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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a little bit mostly | -5 | 8 | -3 | good evening | good evening | 5,0,5 | 5,0,5 | 5 | 0 | 5 | 5 | 0 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | to see if my body still functions my teammates make their way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks of utter desperation it | -5 | 8 | -5 | dude don't get blown up it sucks | shut up | 0,5,6 | -5,4,8 | 0 | 5 | 6 | -5 | 4 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | was so heavily damaged that there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped away and that right there was an excerpt from a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get you back on the podcast obviously | -2 | 6 | 4 | hey thank you for having me | listen do you read that I was like maybe I should have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good | 8,2,5 | 6,4,3 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | hope people realize that that's not what you hear from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate | 7 | 4 | 6 | hope people realize that that's not what you hear from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here | you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate | 2,-1,6 | 8,4,5 | 2 | -1 | 6 | 8 | 4 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | is that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years and when I was ten she died | 8 | 6 | 4 | is that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it | I fought back to another time in my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years and when I was ten she died | 8,4,5 | 2,-5,3 | 8 | 4 | 5 | 2 | -5 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | a good movie but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas it | -2 | 6 | 8 | a good movie but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's becoming like a a moniker of a good thing | it's interesting as as you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart | 2,-3,5 | 0,-1,3 | 2 | -3 | 5 | 0 | -1 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | reason I tell that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on here that have | 7 | 4 | 6 | I tell that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend I think is to at least realize it yeah | you said earlier | 6,4,8 | 2,1,3 | 6 | 4 | 8 | 2 | 1 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | yourself and you say well I guess I'm the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and responsibility for what's going on in your absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just the way it is | 6 | 4 | 8 | yeah I guess I'm the one that messed this up | it is and that's that's a devastating psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and responsibility for what's going on in your absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just the way it is | -8,-5,-6 | 2,6,8 | -8 | -5 | -6 | 2 | 6 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and you think first assume those layers exist right then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we just need you to move by | 3 | 4 | 6 | a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country when in San Francisco the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city can't do their own thing | yeah but they're passionate | 2,-1,6 | 4,5,-2 | 2 | -1 | 6 | 4 | 5 | -2 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move I was beaten and for the moment physically broken I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it was some of that drugs that you were you on were you | -8 | 6 | -5 | now was some of that it was some of that drugs that you were you on | were you on | 0,-3,-5 | 2,4,6 | 0 | -3 | -5 | 2 | 4 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm not | -5 | 8 | -5 | how long has this been going on | the whole time, like ever since I woke up you know | 0,2,5 | 2,-1,3 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 2 | -1 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | family came up to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's why I say Adam could have it had to been God | 6 | 4 | 8 | it's interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right | I will say this I genuinely believe God's strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something impossible | 3,4,6 | 8,7,9 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 7 | 9 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | and that's kind of gruesome but you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're like that's not good to take pictures of you but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like something like a wait guys and busts up | -2 | 6 | 4 | and that's kind of gruesome but you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're like that's not good to take pictures of you but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked | totally took those pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like something like a wait guys and busts up | 2,5,6 | 4,3,5 | 2 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | the phone and start taking bitches like which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's rough so | -2 | 6 | -5 | the phone and start taking bitches like which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's rough | oh you know that's about a week after so there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's rough | 2,-5,3 | -2,-3,5 | 2 | -5 | 3 | -2 | -3 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz | -2 | 6 | 8 | just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon I've got a I've got to go back | yeah, we really shouldn't | 2,8,6 | -2,-1,4 | 2 | 8 | 6 | -2 | -1 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | them on that Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23 servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective right like but just the | -2 | 6 | 8 | this is the simple reality others have had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already talked about today | that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective right like but just the | 4,2,8 | 6,4,5 | 4 | 2 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrQayR_S8k | 14,300 | yjrQayR_S8k | 2020-03-25 00:00:00 | this is Jocko podcast number 222 with
Echo Charles and me Jocko Willing good evening echo good evening someone called
for my Afghan interpreter Rahman a good man with whom we had worked with for
some time these interpreters are the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan they often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to
endure the battlefield alongside us their motivation isn't money there isn't
enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where
you and your family live they are idealists they work and risk death
because they believe in our common cause of freedom Rahman responded to the call
immediately running before me his foot fell in a particular spot just two feet
away from where I stood I was looking right at him as I later discovered he
instantly lost all his limbs in the explosion even though I was staring
right at him I never actually saw it happen my experience was a series of
tremendous blows and subsequent realizations a train hit me ears ringing
what the fuck was that darkness something is wrong
got hit my legs reach down and see if they're still there they're there I feel
them pain everywhere mostly my abdomen something shot through it I think my
eyes must be caked with mud I can barely see anything I hear groaning and
screaming someone hit an ie D pain everywhere but my eyes I crawl around a
little bit mostly to see if my body still functions my teammates make their
way to me I asked someone to pour water on my eyes to remove the dirt so I can
see that doesn't work I can only see light and in some shapes
must be a lot of dirt I recognized my Corman's voice as he works on my wounds
I say dude don't get blown up it sucks he laughs and tells me to shut up
I was conscious throughout our corpsman stopped my bleeding the worst of which
was from my knees and wrapped up my eyes it still did not occur to me that there
was anything wrong with them I could only hear the situation around me my
teammates calling to each other communicating the situation with tense
voices I later found out that a foot wearing the typical Salomon boot that we
all wore hit one of my teammates in the chest about 50 yards away Rahman was
groaning in pain deep deep pain most people's experience of combat wounds is
from the movies a soldier gets hit his guts spilling out and he looks down at
them screaming in horror but this is not the way it is in reality truly bad
injuries SAP your energy and prevent you from screaming instead the sound of
wounded man makes is a much deeper more visceral emanating from the depths of
his being it's a groan a cry a moaning that reeks
of utter desperation it is far worse than a scream it is true pain manifested
in the sound this was the sound that Rahman made it is unforgettable
as the quorum intended to me and we waited for the medevac helicopter a
thought entered my head we may be in a firefight any second now Rahman was
barely alive and he would later die in the hospital
our EEO d chief petty officer took a little Fraggle Sol and would be
evacuated with us all hands were needed to fight I could hear the medevac helo
coming in low this was no time to ask someone to carry me blown up and blind I
stood up and walk myself to it Dave warson who would be killed two
months later heroically laid down cover fire for me as I boarded the helo there
was my last memory of him medics onboard the helicopter took one
look at me laid me down and eased me into unconsciousness I woke up days
later far away from Helmand far away from Kandahar far away from my brothers
and arms far away from the war and dust of Central Asia I was brought back into
consciousness in Germany at the American at the American Hospital long store a
breathing tube was being unceremoniously ripped from my throat rather unpleasant
I opened my eyes or thought I did and saw nothing a physician came to me and
told me the truth my right eye was gone my left eye was so heavily damaged that
there was virtually no chance I would see with it again my future was a future of blindness of
darkness of no sight no color no visual beauty I would never see a sunset a
friend a loved one again in one instant in a fatal footfall all that was ripped
away and that right there was an excerpt from
a book called fortitude written by Dan Crenshaw who is a former SEAL officer
and he's actually been on this podcast before number 118 and the last time he
was on he was in the process of running for Congress well he won and is
currently a congressman serving the 2nd congressional district of Texas in the
House of Representatives and well it's an honor to have Dan back with us today
to share some of the lessons learned that he talks about in his new book and
once again the name of the book is fortitude Dan thanks for coming back man
hey thank you for having me listen do you read that I was like maybe I should
have asked you to read my book in the audio version that was good
well thanks it's uh it's only good because the story that's being told is
is obviously a very powerful one and you know you sent me this book and as soon
as you sent it to me I started talking to you about let's get
you back on the podcast obviously you're a busy man obviously you're busy man
right now for reference it is what is it it's March of 2020 in the midst of the
pandemic the corona virus pandemic is going on around the world and around
America there's schools and again who knows what this will look like looking
back on it when people are listening to sin the future whether if they're
listening to in a month from now a week from now or years from now it'll be
interesting what this pandemic turns out to be but you braved the travel we did
we did and we just you know I'm leaving off the heels of that late night vote
again for for listeners trying to put this in context and what you saw in the
news leaving off the heels of that late night vote where where which was for the
economic stimulus that the the president supported and was bipartisan in nature
different from the eight billion plus dollars that we voted on a week prior
which was meant to combat it on a public health scale so you know I it's every
everybody agrees I think we've as a country and as a government we have
taken this particular pandemic more seriously than anything in the past more
than we did for Ebola or for h1n1 and I've asked that specific questions to
folks like the assistant Surgeon General Admiral red who have worked all of these
pandemics and so I just hope people realize that that's not what you hear
from the media you know the media would tell you that it's so totally unprepared
and you know you're never going to be perfectly prepared I think that's a
lesson you and I know pretty well yeah but you learn those lessons and you do
better than next time the finger-pointing has been completely
unnecessary mostly dishonest and totally unhelpful
but the government has been taking it pretty seriously and we're definitely
taken it seriously in Congress well I'm glad you were able to get out here and
again I think there's no telling what this will look like in hindsight but
it's quiet around here in San Diego right now there's just not a lot of
people doing a lot of stuff obviously we're we're in the gym and the gym you
know not a lot not a ton of people coming into gym right now there's still
people training though don't worry it worked we're training that jiu-jitsu but
yeah you sent me the book and you know cracked it open started reading it and
immediately was just you know getting in touch with you to see if we could get
you out here on the podcast to talk about it and man you know the the stuff
that you've been through and the lessons that you've taken away from it are very
powerful and you know that's one of the things that struck me out of the gate is
that when you got wounded you actually you actually drew strength from very
powerful place and things that you've been through and I want to jump in and
read some more of this um some more of this things that you've been through and
I think a lot of people are gonna be able take a lot away from it so I'm
going back to the book this is after you wounded I fought back to another time in
my life two decades earlier the first time I ever witnessed the kind of
inescapable pain that I was feeling now and the grit to overcome it was with my
mother she fought a battle so many other modern women fight breast cancer and she
did so with endurance Grace and optimism her example has never left me and I
wasn't about to let some cheap-ass AED in the ancient killing fields of
Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory she was only 35 years old when
she was diagnosed same age as me as I write these words when she got the news
it was one day before my little brother's first birthday I was five
years old the doctors told her she might have five years to live and they were
right soon after she would be feeling the pain I was feeling now as the cancer
and chemotherapy ripped apart her body in battle she fought it for five years
and when I was ten she died if you've ever cared for a loved one in terminal
decline you know what that's like there is an intensity of loss that is
immeasurable words don't do it justice the whole deep down in your gut feels
like it will never go away as a child the intensity of the experience is made
worse as grief is amplified by incomprehension going from kindergarten
to fourth grade knowing that your mother is dying that the center of a small
boy's world is collapsing is an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone but
from this grief came learning I got to experience the nature of a true hero and
the example she set was the most powerful fortifying and selfless thing I
have scene including combat buying helpless
in a hospital bed I had to wonder whether my mother had asked the same
desperate question I was currently asking would I ever see my family again
I figured that if she could suffer through that question and the unknowable
answer so could I my mother spent half a decade staring death in the face burned
with caring for two small boys whom she would not live to see grow up
she lived day to day in ever-increasing pain the cancer afflicted her and the
cancer treatments afflicted her to six rounds of chemotherapy on top of
radiation treatments are a brutal experience for even the strongest
constitution self-pity is never a useful state but if anyone had reason to feel
sorry for herself and had to complain a bit it was my mom but she never did in
terminal decline and in pain across five years I never heard her complain once I
never heard her bolon her fate I never saw her express self-pity every day she
woke up was a day she was still alive and she lived she was dying and she was
grateful to not be dead yet every extra day was a gift where she could look her
boys in the face every next evening was another night she could tell us she
loved us before bed even during her last days when the hospital delivered her
deathbed and hospice nurse to our dining room her demeanor did not change Susan
Carol Crenshaw was exactly the opposite of what she had every right to be brutal yeah yeah that was more for my
mom than for me you know I tell that story because well that the name of that
chapter is perspective from darkness and perspective I think is something we lack
in our modern-day society we are I think too many people are willing to jump to
this false conclusion that you've had it the worse that your life is worse than
your ancestors or than your peers or than anybody else walking around America
right now and there's just a really just so happens there's a really good chance
that's not true I'm not saying it's not true I'm just
saying there's a pretty good chance that's probably not true it's
interesting too I always talk about perspective from a leadership
perspective which means hey if I'm looking at one of my troops the better I
understand their perspective on what I'm telling them and what their job is and
what the mission is the better I'm gonna be able to lead them and same thing with
my boss the better I understand my boss's perspective and what the strategy
looked like and what's the overall thing he's trying to get accomplished the
better I understand his perspective the better I'm gonna be able to lead and
it's interesting cuz when you put that across society you would think that in
today's day and age with the a bit with social media with the ability to absorb
as so many other people's perspectives you'd think that that would open up your
mind yeah to realize that that there's you know a lot of other people that that
have been through much worse than then anything I've even been close to gone
through yeah and yet it doesn't seem to be happening that way no and I mean one
of the most popular stories for an American to hear you know is is a story
of overcoming adversity and that's a good thing I'm glad those are still the
the stories that are the most popular in the American psyche you know that a
movie about somebody who's downtrodden and overcomes it it's still a good movie
but there there is it's undeniable that there is this fragility
is infecting America and that's that's why I wrote this book and it's um you
know it's not a political book it's not a sealed book it's not a it's it's a
cultural book it's it's a cultural philosophy book and it's it's it's
simultaneously an individual kind of self-help book and just how to be
mentally tougher in your own individual life but there are much broader cultural
implications that are strewn throughout the book it is a it is a culture book
and because I fear that we are getting more sensitive more more prone to
microaggressions and prone to saying how offended you are and wearing wearing
that offense on your sleeve proudly and and and this gets to the I think what's
the the next chapter which is who is your hero and we've changed what we look
up to like we think that it's good to to scream about how offended we are that's
becoming like a a moniker of a good thing you know it's interesting as as
you know before we started recording you know we're just talking about kind of
life in the games and and if there's one thing that you never do in the teams and
ever is show anyone that you're offended by anything that you're saying to you
because if you allow that to happen you know you're gonna get torn apart whereas
it seems like and I hadn't thought about from that perspective the all the rage
in the public right now is if you can possibly get offended by something then
it's you're you're the you're the best thing in the world you know jump up and
down and point to the person that offended you and why you were offended
and and the more offended you are the better off the aggrieved victim status
is supreme these days and that's a and that's more of a serious problem than
then I think most Americans are giving it credit for like it's a really bad
thing because you're changing you're changing our heroes and and when I say
heroes I want to want to be more specific cousin and I outlined this in
the book in greater detail I don't mean like Jaco is my hero I don't actually
and I person when people asked me about who I look up to and my heroes I I will
tell them attributes of people that I think are respectable
don't think you should have one person that you look up to I don't think that's
totally healthy and that's not what I'm talking about in the book I'm talking
about hero archetypes you know in an archetype is a is a is a broader set of
ideas or attributes that we sort of that we sort of recognize collectively okay
that's it's more of a psychological term than anything else and there are certain
hero archetypes you know like the Navy SEALs have a hero archetype when we
write about that in our in our SEAL ethos it's such a beautifully written
ethos and I and I have the entire thing written in the book because it perfectly
demonstrates what we believe we should be now what we should do but what we
should be and that's a really interesting thing and I and I and I know
that you look at a corporate ethos and if you go to people like corporations
websites and you read them there they're usually something like we want to be the
number one manufacturer on the west coast it's like that's not who you want
to be that's just something you want to do if you if you write out an ethos of
who you want to be you can you can reach that level of elitism you can surpass
mediocrity so that's important that's important thing is here is that we have
societal hero archetypes that we look up to Jesus is a is a hero archetype
Superman is a hero archetype real characters too you know I put I could
name a thousand you know Rosa Parks Ronald Reagan these all of these people
embody certain attributes that the American people think this is good okay
man we generally agree on these things I tell the whole story in the book about
about when I was at Disney World or was it Disneyland it was Disney World and I
was at the Star Wars land and I was watching this really cool thing happened
where they where they let these kids do Jedi training and of course like in
typical Disney fashion everything is really well run the actors are
absolutely amazing and they're teaching these kids you know how to work their
swords and all that but they're also teaching them really cool things like
just little Jedi lessons like like will you let your emotions be driven by hate
and anger you know like really simple because we look up to the Jedi as like a
hero archetype and so there are certain things that are just viewed as good but
that's changing and I and I find that to be an extremely dangerous thing because
we're the aggrieved victim the person who talks about being offended the most
and who screams the loudest were elevating that person to a higher level
in our society and that's dangerous you're flipping cultural norms on their
head and you do that at your own peril you know and ends you know cultural
foundations based in thousands of years of trial and error and wisdom those are
important they're more important than people realize and like that's that's
that's frankly what the first I guess well that that particular chapter is
about perspectives chapter you know they're all related of course but the
perspectives chaffed and the reason I bring up my mom and the reason I tell
that story and then subsequent stories of of other guys that we've lost is
because you you need to it's healthy to go through life thinking you know what
somebody has hard had it harder than me and I'd like to live up to their memory
I'd like to live up to that hero attribute the hero that are the hero
archetype of my mother and I'm not lying she never complained she just never did
and if she did I didn't hear it as a kid and so when you're living in blindness
and not sure whether you will see again it's healthy to have that in your head
and I mean I say you don't have to uh you don't have to experience a bomb in
your face to get some perspective but you can read about it and it's like you
said earlier in a world where we're so connected and we can see everybody
else's story of hardship you would think that we would have more perspective but
but it seems that the opposite is true and first steps of reversing that trend
I think is to at least realize it yeah we we recently had on Rose Schindler who
was a house where it's survivor and I got many many many messages and comments
coming back saying yeah myself in check you know I I don't have
it that bad so that and yet we've had many people on
here that have been through some really hellacious things whether it's prisoner
war camps just devastating situations and it is it's it's it if they weren't
here to here I get the feeling sometimes that if people weren't hearing it here
they wouldn't be hearing it they wouldn't be hearing it you know they'd
just be thinking that everyone is living better than they are and they're the
ones that are in the worst possible situation in the world we've got yeah
that's a you know I don't bring it too much to politics but it is it is it is
one reason that we that we have lurched into this conversation about socialism
because fundamentally socialism is as an ideology that pits people against each
other you have to believe that somebody else is oppressing you and that they
have it better than you for you to embrace socialism it is it is envy it is
the ultimate sin manifested into a political ideology not the ultimate sin
but it's one of them and that's I was I'm always looking for the deeper reason
as to why something is happening and it is natural for for people to want to
believe that something outside their own power is fact is affecting their lives
because if it's you if it's your fault if it's you who has to step up that's
harder it's much easier to believe that there's something else it also is an
assault on your ego when you look at yourself and you say well I guess I'm
the one that messed this up yeah it is and that's that's a devastating
psychological consequence when your ego is hurt that way it is yeah I wrote a
book about that called extreme ownership it's good but again it's it's one of
those things where you know you wrote this book as you know as you're saying
like a cultural philosophy you know life and I wrote extreme ownership as well as
leadership principles but I mean it well it didn't take but two seconds for
everyone to say oh yeah what you're talking about is you know easily
transforms into a into a cultural philosophy of taking ownership and
responsibility for what's going on in your
absolutely there's no doubt about it and you find yourself in the lot in light
and look do people get cancer yes people get cancer to do horrible things happen
to people to families yes absolutely how do you respond to those things is the
question how do you take ownership of what you do next and and that's the
that's the big difference and if what you do next is is you know say it's out
of my control and I can't do anything and your get the mentality that you're a
victim of what's happening around you that means you're not gonna make any
changes to transform your life and move in a more positive direction it's just
the way it is and you know I think I think one of these things that happens
with you know these ideas behind socialism in America and again it's it's
like crazy that we would be sitting here talking about this anybody that anybody
that reads anything about history knows that this is just not good but you know
it comes across always as hey well what we want to do is help everyone out
that's what we want to do we want to help everyone out and okay if that's
like the core belief and this is where I think sometimes we could do better or
you know someone like myself could do a better job explaining to people look if
you care about other human beings so much if you want to help as many people
as possible in this country the best possible thing you could do is allow the
market to flourish allow people to build businesses that's what you that's what
changes people's lives that that's what helps not get giving them a handout and
making them reliable or a reliant on the state right it doesn't help anybody it
helps them for a week you know it helps them for that pay period but it doesn't
help them transform their lives into something more positive when one way I
explained that exact sentiment is to ask someone to imagine how they would raise
their kid if they love their kid you know would you give them whatever they
want would you would you tell your kid that whatever they do wrong it's it's
not their fault somebody else made them do it wrong would you tell them that
there's no consequences for their actions would you tell them that if they
do an hour of chores and their sibling does three hours
that they deserve the same reward and would you teach them any of these things
there is no liberal who would teach at their kids these things they don't
because they love their kids and they want their kids to be successful but
that's effectively what we're teaching what we're saying that we should teach
our citizens and so I ask people why don't we treat our citizens the way we
treat our kids as if we loved them because that's true compassion it
doesn't mean we don't have a social safety net right and that's always the
counter-argument it's a disingenuous counter-argument well the
counter-argument to that is look with your kids
and this is an example that I use when I especially when I'm talking to
businesses so I say listen like what will be with a start-up right that's
grown from you know they were ten people then there are hundred people now
they're getting to that threshold and I say listen at some point you're gonna
have to put some discipline on what's going on inside of your company you're
gonna have to have people come to work and that aligned times you're gonna have
to have them eat lunch at certain times not just like you're gonna have to
you're to have to have meetings and that are scheduled and look when you've got a
company of twelve people you can get away with all that stuff there and it's
great there's money coming in and everything's but as soon as you start to
grow well you have to start to have discipline inside your organization
right and so the example I give people is I say listen have you ever met a kid
that when he's when he's born look when a when a child is born you give whatever
they want you got to keep them alive right there's your social state like you
have to give them food water milk you have to get you have to feed them you
have to take care of them if you continue to do that when they're three
four five well by the time they're ten you actually now have Satan for a child
yeah because this kid is totally out of control
do demanding doesn't it not only is totally demanding but doesn't know how
to do anything for themselves can't make them solve the sandwich can't tie their
own shoes it can't do anything so what you have to do is you have to let people
fend for themselves you have to let kids brush up against the guardrails of
failure you you have to do that and yes you have to do that with society as well
in my opinion and that's what that's what the thing the argument that I don't
hear back at people that are saying hey we should give everything away for free
is listen for that we don't have enough to give away everything for free right
the best way that you can take care of the most amount of people is to allow
freedom allow individual freedom allowed people to pursue goals allow people to
pursue business allow people to grow things and hire people that's how you
that's how we all win it's so it's crazy to me that we still have these
discussions and it's also yeah it's crazy to me that we're having these
discussions right now like this there's like this belief that they subscribe to
which is if only politicians want so mean and corrupt you know there's all
these things hidden that we could just give you but they don't want to and I
most like does that really sound right like this is that does that really sound
like that's that's correct that was just all just extra money just hidden in the
in the in the Treasury that we could just give out what we don't want to that
everybody that we have all these luxury apartments that we could just give out
you know because housings are right or whatever or that or that there's just
enough doctors and hospitals to take care of everyone and they're just kind
of waiting around like not you know I mean like come on you know it's it's not
if something if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is and again it
doesn't mean that we don't want to keep striving for a you know broader access
to health care it doesn't mean that we want to keep don't want to keep striving
for a or efficient social safety net not saying that but the but they lurch to
the to the progressive left and socialism is it's it's it's based upon
this idea that that we're keeping something from you and it's just not
true it's based on this idea to that that that where do I want to go with
this it's it's kind of like a constant escalation of crisis and it's it's it's
not surprising that we got there okay and this is what I mean by that if
you're a progressive you're generally wanting more progress right change for
the sake of change itself is often the case and you have to promise more things
than you did last time right because fundamentally
it's it's it's based in the sense of compassion you know giving people things
from the government they don't think very much they don't think much more
about what that does to the foundation of the creation that you talked about
it's just giving me four more things and it's almost like they relied on
conservatives for the last hundred years to at least to at least be an obstacle
to their to their worst instincts right because the goods conservatives are the
ones who say okay hold on like ease think of the second third order
consequences of that think of what that does to our foundations
when I say foundations I mean foundations of a free-market system that
creates all this wealth in the first place like you can't you can't just you
can't remove the legs of the stool if you want to improve the stool I get it
let's work on that but don't remove the legs of the stool it'll just fall same
with our political foundations same with our cultural foundations there's three
groups that are very important we can I could go on for hours about this but but
I'll try and stay on top on this line of thought here and so you promise more
things and you promise more things and eventually you're like running out of
things to promise and you've got to be bolder and bolder and bolder this is how
you get socialism well-intentioned liberalism always leads to socialism it
takes years but it happens we're at that point now okay like the the the the
well-intentioned liberals maybe the the the smarter you know Democrats that
Republicans have often worked with who I think always over-promised but know full
well that the Republican colleagues will sort of measure the the policy and I
don't think they believe it themselves frankly but they've created a generation
that does believe it this is where we're at right now the AOC s of the world are
true believers and they've got a lot of followers this is what happens when this
this lie of compassion gets told too many times a generation starts to
actually believe it and this is the situation we're in now this is why 70
percent of the Millennials surveyed will say they would vote for a socialist now
there's good news and bad news associated with the number like that
they don't always define socialism correctly which is good yeah true and
also I was having a conversation with someone about
this is a day I mean in 1968 how many 20 year olds would have said they would
have voted for socialism it probably probably 70 percent as well yeah you
know there was a socialist candidate I can't remember the name right now but I
just saw this quote and it was so interesting because that socialist
communist candidate back then in the 60s basically said what I just said you know
you've got a I can't remember the exact quote but it was something along the
lines of the the the elements of liberal policy are there to eventually create
the fabric of socialism for us it's like it's then that is exactly what happens
it happens a little bit at a time and here's another way of thinking about it
that I help people understand okay so you want to raise the minimum minimum
wage okay and you want to raise it to 15 bucks an hour or 20 bucks an hour and
that's fine there's it's guaranteed that you will lose jobs when you do that
that's it's guaranteed okay and so you lose jobs and depending on how much you
raise it in the cost of living in that area you'll lose a certain number of
jobs okay well the the well-intentioned liberal
and government who wants to control the economy says well we don't want to lose
the jobs okay we'll just make people hire more just make make the employers
hire more people okay fine so you make them hire more people but they still
have to pay that minimum wage well their costs haven't changed and they're their
overall budget hasn't changed so so now what well then they have to raise prices
right raise prices Jasta cailli well now there's hyperinflation and that's not
good and also the poor people can't afford the things that they want to buy
so that's not good okay well just make them lower the
prices look we're going out of business okay just take over the business so now
you own the means of production and I'm not saying it happens that quickly but
that's how it happens like there's there's there's oh there's a logical
line there well that well-intentioned first step of intervening in the markets
has consequences and eventually if you want to control it well you have to
really control it and then you're in a really bad place because then you're
then you then you're actually controlling productions when you do that
then you're in a place called Venezuela yeah
and that isn't turning out so well all right little tangent right there hi
well it's actually I go into this huge discussion about the minimum wage in the
book yeah not because because this actually
relates to mental toughness because the way I relate it in the book is part of
being part of having fortitude part of being mentally tough is having the
ability to think through some questions before you react emotionally very simple
and I'm pretty sure I think I think that example is used in the chapter called be
still and and I mean that quite literally just be still when you hear
something that is emotionally triggering or you disagree with think about that
this notion that there might be another side to the story like just maybe if you
just ask some questions and at first again the minimum wage it seems like the
right thing to do like how people should just get paid more I want them to get
paid more they should so I just give the arguments in there like there's economic
arguments and there's geographical arguments by that I mean you know why
would you have a federal minimum wage that's the same for the entire country
when in San Francisco the the rent is thirty five hundred dollars a month and
in Lubbock Texas seven hundred dollars a month you know does that that really
quickly makes the case against a federal minimum wage not saying that each city
can't do their own thing then I go into the economic arguments of who's actually
working a minimum wage jobs the point isn't to make the argument against the
minimum wage the point is to get you to understand that this issue like many
many other issues and questions has many many layers to it and if you stop and
you think first assume those layers exist right
then the next step is look into the layers and there might be more to it and
when you do that you are exhibiting mental strength you're exhibiting the
ability to not react but to just ask questions and like I have a feeling I'm
just a feeling that the the people really angrily waving those $15 minimum
wage signs have not looked into the our treatments yeah but they're passionate
yes really um you know I at our factory up in Maine you know this is a class
thing like sometimes you need more people to load boxes and who do you get
who do you who do you get to load box this is an unskilled job like hey we
just need you to move by it's not even loading by it's moving boxes from here
in the warehouse to where they're gonna get loaded on trucks to get take shipped
out you know you know who wants that job a kid that's a 16 years old that you
know does needs gas money and he's gonna work that job two hours a night whatever
and make a little bit of cash on the side that's cool we can afford to do
that at that our business the minute you say hey instead of paying that guy 10
bucks an hour you got to give him $16 an hour
well now it's guess what we're gonna take we're gonna just take some of our
other labor and have them fill in you know half an hour your half an hour
there and all of a sudden with you've eliminated three jobs that the overall
budget of the business does not change just because you changed the minimum
wage but there's this like belief and again you know it's I'm always amazed by
how little pockets put into some of these you know feel good policy policy
proposals like as if there's no second third order consequences to these things
and like you just you have to think through that we just have to that would
be nice all right let's get back to the book I'm
gonna take you back to the you just did you just deep reef the entire book we
descend now all right so here we go awake now in long stool I could not move
I was beaten and for the moment physically broken
I was riddled with shards and debris under under the skin and deep within I
was swollen badly suffering from a thousand small cuts everything burned
and itched though oddly enough I don't recall any pain in my eyes I said before
that I woke up unable to see but this was not entirely true I could see I
could not see my surroundings true but I was certainly seeing I was surrounded by
constant hallucinations the result of my optic nerve still communicating
erratically with my brain the hallucinations were lucid and all
followed a pattern I was in Afghanistan I was with the guys I was in an Afghan
village mud walls and compounds there was an Afghan man sitting next to me
there were piles of weapons in the corner I lived my previous experiences I
lived my previous experiences over and over again I knew it wasn't real I was
hallucinating but not delusional if I was awake I was seeing these images if I
was lucky enough to fall asleep and dream never more than 30 minutes then I
would wake up and still wake up still inside the visual reality of the dream
that sounds insane that was that was that was insane now was some of that it
was some of that drugs that you were you on were you on any drugs that were
giving you hallucinations no or this was just all your optic nerves communicating
and there's there's some I research this you know later in life and there's
there's some history of this happening to people who go suddenly blind that
that optic nerve voles continue to do that it couldn't have been drugs I mean
the only drugs I was on or painkillers and the wouldn't wouldn't have that
effect there was just some weird things that was it was it was so weird
and and kind of terrifying and it just it just it amplified the whole
experience because I knew it wasn't real I knew it wasn't real there was but I
would I would always see them there and I would talk about them and so you know
the stranger stories are from my my friends there's a couple seals who came
to me with Lance to Landstuhl which was it's such a enormous blessing you know
you can't even describe how important it is for somebody in that state to just
have somebody they know or at least somebody they kind of trust it doesn't
even have to be a team guy you know it could just be somebody who understands
you just there and I remember this old Afghan man sitting next to me and it was
always like a weird blue light like it was it was it really was like I'm could
dream out of the movies you know we're like a band and his face would be kind
of melting I just remembered that very specifically I don't remember all the
hallucinations but I and I always remember piles of weapons it was really
like we were I was remembering the moments which were so many because we
would always do two to three day ops on that particular deployment
and so we'd holed up in some compound they knew it you know it's like a you
know are all the guys are just in this tiny little room together shooting the
shit and our weapons are kind of strewn throughout and that's what I would see I
was just seeing that experience all the time the mud walls and one particularly
weird dream I and I think I do describe this in the book it's uh I was I was
like I was in a third world country and like in a department store you know like
going through a very crowded department store not with people but with clothes
like they're like there did they you know cuz in like a lot of these
countries they'd just it's not like Walmart you know where you can
comfortably walk through things like they pack too much stuff in because they
don't have that much space but they got a lot of stuff and they pack it in there
and I'm just like trying to move through these clothes and it's like musty and
the lights are fluorescent like again like this is just a very thorough bold
country kind of scene you know couldn't say where it was but I've been to a lot
of third-world countries so my mind is used to this sort of visualization and
then I woke up and I know I'm awake but I'm still there that's what really
sucked to not be able to leave the nightmare
like I was literally living in a nightmare and we always used the word
literally wrong in our modern-day society I'm not using it wrong I was
literally living in the nightmare and like it was inescapable not that's what
sucks because like you just couldn't you couldn't shake it and that that's all
this was just a horrible place to be it finally went away when a nurse an astute
nurse an observant nurse just realized what was going on and she started asking
us about it and my wife is just like kind of exasperated at this point she
wasn't my wife then but she was you know fiance then and she's just you know
exhausted and like just trying to deal with this and I think it was like I
think it was like right after my first surgery or maybe right before I don't
remember but she was just like how long has this been going on and we're like
the whole time like ever since I woke up you know so days and maybe a week I'm
not really sure um she's like that's not good you should
mean her response was like you will have a reparable PTSD if this continues you
know because like you just living in a nightmare is not a great place to be
it's just and and so she shot me up with a bunch of ativan which was like it's
it's a hard anti-anxiety drug and then then it got really weird
then the hallucinations chained didn't go away right away they changed to
Christmas so I was like in a I was like in like a like a Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer Christmas world this is what you're seeing yeah even though you can't
see anything this is what you see yeah it's very Christmas world it's very
vivid it's not like when you close your eyes and imagine things it's like it was
vivid the Christmas rolled was cool that's cool yeah it was more relaxing it
was like it was happier um and then it went black and then black
black was the best that was that was good it was like you would know you
would never think that you'd be happy to be blind but like that was that was a
good it was necessary I could finally take a nap going back to the book here
Tara this is your fiancee at the time Tara was there when I finally arrived in
Bethesda and never left my side from that moment on most of my family came up
to see me as did many friends they were far more worried than I was and their
spirits were low this was most likely due to the fact that they were mentally
coherent enough to sense the pessimistic expectations of my surgeons the doctor
did not think I would see again they said so many times and I simply didn't
believe them my optimism my self-deception and my belief that the
coming surgery on my left eye would work and that I would see was nothing less
than a delusional gift that allowed me to keep my sanity though I am NOT one
for overt expressions of faith I will say this I genuinely believe God's
strength was working through me then he was allowing me to believe something
impossible I prayed and my family prayed and we believed
we believe that the military surgeons would pick through a pierced and
shrapnel ridden I removed the most miniscule shards and debris and then
restore my sight we did not have good reason to believe it but we did it's
interesting that you call this self-deception and delusional that yeah
it sounds like everyone else was just like hey man you know losing a good horn
yeah it really stops a obviously that's exactly right it was it was a necessary
self delusion and again I was like I don't know why that was it's in that's
why I say Adam could have it had to been God God saying you know I can't I'm not
gonna save your eye for you bud lorelei insurgents to do that but I'll at least
allow you to believe that it's possible because otherwise you're gonna go to
nuts and again it's it's I I think Mike you know whatever you want to call it
post-traumatic growth afterwards is is a function of being able to to live
through the experience a certain way because it's terrifying to think that
you might not see again that's terrifying and you know and I and I'm
again because that that chapter is called perspective from darkness there
are other veterans who immediately lost both eyes they had no chance of seeing
again that's hardship I didn't have to deal with that you know after somebody
else has had it worse than you always remember that even when you get blown up
in the face yeah the doctors and that continued it wasn't just being able to
see anything again it was being able to see well again I was demanding I was
demanding the first surgery so the first surgery for my left eye my right eye is
gone my right eye was gone in Kandahar they happen to be an ophthalmologist
there that enucleated the eye right away they do that early on so that your body
will focus on the eye that's you know possibly savable but the right eye was
so screwed up and I wish that pictures of it and that's kind of gruesome but
you know and people don't want to take pictures of you in that because they're
like that's not good to take pictures of you
but but uh you know keep in mind that the person might want those pictures
later on that it's people don't realize his kirsty edison and she got you know
she got in the helo crash in afghanistan and you know she's a beautiful girl and
she had pictures of her face where 50 cal like the way that the helo went down
I mean it it did some massive damage to her face and she has pictures of it and
look at the pictures and you can't believe that you know she was able to
recover the way she did it's amazing but you know she's a marine and I will say
that she's much aligned with your feelings on this I think she's pretty
stoked that she has those pictures of herself all jacked totally took those
pictures though was it the kind like Oh after they got into like the medical you
know what actually I think it was I think it was if you remember her story
there was some a really good plastic surgeon like a bright red the ladies
version and female plastic surgeon that I think was probably like oh I'm gonna
document this yes he's so there's a difference between that and then like
something like a wait guys and busts up the phone and start taking bitches like
which is what you think the team guy would do and I think I would obviously
go all cool check out fans are there I I'm gonna get some snacks to this and we
got some you know so I've only got one picture but it's a good week out I mean
it's not it's at least a few days like it's um there's some healing that has
taken place but I look bad like it looks like a shock it looks like I'd hit in
the face with a shotgun that's what my face looks like it's show it to you
right now if you really want to see it just so you can react to it I've never posted it because it's a
little it's a little too gruesome for posting blurry doubt but the option yeah
the well not I kind of lost my train of thought well yeah so you get that you
get the surgery in the book you talk about they removed the broken lens yes
oh no copper wire that was in there right bunch of other debris
so hallucinations stop and then then your six weeks they got to
put you in a position for six weeks to recover right so there's a couple things
that happened here that's the picture oh you know that's about a week after so
there's there's some healing there but it's not looking great it's yeah that's
rough so damn Yeah right eyes gone left eye has a as a cataract meaning the lens
which is in the middle of your eye is is destroyed cataracts are pretty normal
thing for older folks to get you know just basically means the lens has kind
of I don't know the right term is but kind of clouds over you need to replace
it in my case it was trauma induced so just bunch of fragments burst through
the eye and destroyed the lens you can kind of look at a lens like a window
alright and this is an important way of thinking about it because if it clouds
over if that windows just you can't see through it anymore we'll just replace
the windowpane but if the blast destroys the window then you're trying to so a
new window pane onto basically the curtains which are like the scelera of
your eye and that was sort of the situation I was dealing with so the
first miracle was they removed the lens entirely so okay so that things out
because I remember this I think I think it was in Landstuhl I sort of remember
them shining a really bright light my eye just to see if I could see light and
I could see some light when they did that what I saw was like darkness but
there was like a light almost like we're in this room right now and there's this
bright light above our heads it's kind of like that but everything else was
like a cloud like like being like on an air but like imagine you're like going
through a cumulus cloud as you're taking off like that's what it looks like very
odd and strange and again so the first miracle this in a battle you know maybe
a week later when I finally got back to the Bethesda we did the surgery they
removed the big copper wire that had really been destroying my eye so that's
good and so we kind of start to see some blurriness after that you know which is
kind of what I see now as I look at you now I'm wearing a contact and without if
I took this contact out I wouldn't wreck nice you I don't know wouldn't know I
wouldn't run into things necessarily but I can't see anything you know it's it's
it's I mean I well it's like you know twenty one thousand vision it's I can't
really see anything it's just it's just blurry can't see clothes can't see far
can't find my glasses if I lose them the glasses I do have four like that thick
that's what I wear at night or on airplanes or you know if I don't feel
like wearing a contact so that never goes away but at the time I wanted it to
go away like I wanted to be like no just make the eye better doctors why can't
you just do that cuz I got a I got places to be okay and they're like yeah
do you you know it was like I was like yeah I mean I was like okay so you just
did this surgery remove the cataract now I want a new lens so that I don't have
to wear like Contacts and glasses because I don't look cool in these
glasses right I'm not a fan and uh you know I don't really have to contact
situation yet and and I actually wouldn't for two and a half years it
would take to get a really good contact that's actually comfortable and so I was
like just just do the surgery and they're like well and I'm they're like
we really shouldn't and I was like okay what's the how much do we have to wait
to do the surgery you know what's the what's the minimum time cuz I need to
have it as soon as possible because you know I got to get back to the platoon
I've got a I've got to go back and they're like well I mean I guess
technically six weeks I'm like six weeks it is and like I couldn't see them at
the time but they're looking at each other like what the hell are you talking
about like this isn't you don't understand what your situation is it's
like they were just I mean and my wife tells me all this now cuz I couldn't see
them and I couldn't I wasn't self-aware enough to gauge
people's reactions I was in you know totally different state of mind I was on
a lot of painkillers and drugs and so you know and and and just like full-on
seal mode layer get the job daughter must get back to platoon kill bad guys
and it's just like wasn't making sense to people like they were just like I
don't know what's wrong with this guy and so they just kind of humored me I
think like they're just like yeah sure and we'll definitely definitely do that
but they would have no and no intention of doing it for good reason and then and
then what you're talking about the six weeks blindness that occurred later
so at least miracles happened and like we saved my eye and that was really
exciting but then they you know but they're but they're looking at it every
day and they do this one test and they see this hole in my retina so that's not
a big deal because it's just just a hole you know it means there's some blind
spots and as I look at you I can kind of see the blind spot it's like right in my
face an own but I deal with it it's annoying when I read frankly the problem
with that is your retina the anatomy of your retina causes that hole to expand
there's a film there's like a it's like a membrane on the back of your retina
that creates tension and so anytime there's a hole in your retina that means
the hole will just expand slowly so it's macular degeneration this again this
happens with older folks quite a bit the way to fix that is remove the membrane
we're not really sure why the membranes on there in the first place and so you
just remove the membrane and then you're good all right but and that's fine
that's actually pretty normal surgery but for me it was a really high-risk
surgery because you know my eyes so fragile and so they're worried about the
retina detaching luckily it did not you know because well who knows why again
God's intervention and but you do have to be face down for six weeks to recover
from that so that was just just suck you had to lay face down the entire time for
six you have the latest face down because what they do is they they inject
this gas into your eye and that creates a bubble which creates tension so and if
the bubble is meant to be pressed up against your retina to keep it in place
the only way for it to press up against your retina is for you to be looking
down and so you just look just sucks you just have to be face down doesn't
matter how you're doing it just lay down or walk facedown or whatever it is but
just make sure you're facing down for six weeks and you're blind the whole
time most of the time they'll do this like
one eye at a time so if somebody can see still but you know I'm not a one eye at
a time kind of guy anymore you get past that you say when the six
weeks were over I sat up and I was not blind moreover with the help of a truly
remarkable contact lens from Boston sight to which the Navy referred me
years later I was eventually returned to 20/20 correct hole vision in my left eye
that's the story of being blown up I can't say I recommend the experience yet
even as it was happening even in the moment after the blast I had to admit it
could have been worse I still had my legs I had my arms I had ten fingers and
ten toes my brain worked even after a severe concussion I was still alive it
is impossible not to constantly think of the many veterans who have sacrificed so
much more impossible not to think of Seale Petty Officer second class
Mike Mansoor who threw himself on a grenade while on a rooftop in Ramadi in
Iraq 2006 saving his teammates impossible not to think of Air Force
Master Sergeant John Chapman who fought all night against the Taliban coming in
and out of consciousness from his wounds eventually succumbing to them on that
Afghan Ridgeline but only after earning the Medal of Honor for saving 23
servicemembers impossible not to think of my platoon members and dear friends
Dave warson and Pat fix who were killed just two months after I was evacuated
from Helmand impossible not to think of their loved ones who had been expecting
them home a month later impossible not to think of the eight men whose initials
are tattooed on my chest in remembrance Charles Keating the fourth Patrick fix
Dave warson Brad Kavner Brett Mary you Kevin Evert Brendan
Looney and Tom Falc this is the simple reality others have
had it harder than me many many others from that darkness comes realism from
that realism comes gratitude from gratitude comes perspective a healthy
sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage is an antidote to self-pity
despair and weakness it's not a cure-all for your mental state when faced with
adversity but it is sure to dull the edges of your worst tendencies toward
mental breakdown yeah that's the that's the perspective that you and I already
talked about today that perspective that it would be seemed like it would be very
helpful for people to think about it is and you know I'm using extreme examples
right not everybody can relate to that but they don't have to and I don't I
don't want you to go be in a terrible situation just to earn some perspective
right like but just the simple reminder to yourself that it exists like somebody
else has had it harder that's there's a comfort in that I think and it is an
antidote to self-pity self-pity is a gateway to the outrage culture that I
think we see all around us and so that is a gateway to the socialistic
tendencies I think that we've been seeing as of late and you can avoid
these things with some perspective and gratitude and you know it's it's again
it's it's hard for anybody the teams to ever feel sorry for themselves when you
know because you know of these guys and you know some of those guys I listed of
course and you know if there's ever a reason
you need to get up in the morning not at 4:30 but like like later you know get a
normal human time then then the boys who wish they could get up you know that's a
good reason because they would like to be able to get up and they can't and
their widows are really wishing they would get up too and they can't you know
and the Manus where I mentioned unsung heroes but the widows are here the the
heroes of the SEAL Teams III have yet to meet the wife of one of those guys who
fell into self-pity and despair I have only met I only know ones who have
overcome with the greatest grace it's just amazing I've watched these watch
these women just serve as the most ultimate example mothers as well you
know that I know you know like Debbie Lee for instance it's absolutely it's
just it's just incredible to watch that fortitude we just we just couldn't do it
without them yeah it's always one of the things about about marks mom and life
and I talk about this a lot is you know when when we called her from Iraq to
talk to her and to console her she was consoling us you know she was wanted to
make sure we were okay she wanted to make sure we were handling think she
wanted to know if we needed anything you know that was her attitude out of the
gate now and that shows you you know the kind of people that you're talking about
you know someone that's that's taking their own personal worst nightmare that
any you know any parent could ever have of losing their kid and immediately
saying well what can I do for you guys yeah it is unbelievable
he's uh you know it was recent friend good friend I lost was was Chuck Keating
the fourth and you know his his wife started a foundation in his name
his dad as well and his family's just been incredible but that's not that
that's that's not the exception like that's been the rule from what I've seen
and it's so much harder to be the family left behind than it is to to be us I
think you know we go and we choose to do this thing overseas and we're doing it
with our brothers in arms and we love it and we know what's coming the next day
we we're in control to an extent to the greatest extent we can be but our family
is not there they're their life doesn't change except that we're just not there
and they don't know what's happening and then they get a call and I don't
actually go into detail and my wife's experience on the perspectives from
darkness but but you know she gets a call and so her only consolation is that
it's a call and not a guy at the door but you know it's a call that she's
getting before 6 a.m. and before she her alarm goes off to go to work and and
then there's you know the very typical kind of lack of exact information given
to her she's not sure what my face looks like because they're because they don't
know what my face looks like they're not sure if it's still there but my head is
still there like there's all this misinformation get enough enough
information to just plant seeds of absolute horror it's horrible and guess
who but but you know who the who you know who went there first was the loony
family row you know it's like it's it's it was it's Amy Looney their canoe her
husband two years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just
that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you
know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish
were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other
and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was
I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so
rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always
make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around
it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that
you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are
going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book
that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're
real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you
gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called
who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking
about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units
are relentless in the pursuit of establishing hero archetypes doing so is
extremely important when the goal is to create a monoculture
that operates as a mission oriented team this is a community with a very deep
sense of who we want to be we talk about it all the time and we beat it into our
trainees Jocko specifically into our trainees I did some here's some of the
things that will be beaten into you you will be someone who is never late you
will be someone who takes care of his men gets to know them and puts their
needs before yours you will be someone who does not quit in the face of
adversity you will be someone who takes charge and
leans when no one else will you will be detail-oriented always vigilant you will
be aggressive in your actions but never lose your cool you will have a sense of
humor because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours
you will work hard and perform even when no one is watching you will be creative
and think outside the box even if it gets you in trouble you are a rebel but
not a mutineer you are a jack of all trades and master of none and then you
go into the official ethos which you mentioned earlier
I was debating if I should read this and I think I'm actually just gonna read it
it's a good ethos so here we go in times of war or uncertainty there's a special
breed of warrior ready to answer our nation's call a common man with uncommon
desire to succeed forged by adversity he stands alongside America's finest
special operations forces to serve his country the American people and protect
their way of life I am that man my Trident is a symbol of honor and
heritage bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before it embodies the
trust of those I have sworn to protect by wearing the Trident I accept the
responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life it is a privilege that I
must earn every day my loyalty to country and team is beyond reproach I
humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those
who are unable to defend themselves I do not advertise the nature of my work
nor seek recognition for my actions I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards
of my profession placing the welfare and security of others before my own I serve
with honor on and off the battlefield the ability to control my emotions and
my actions regardless of circumstance sets me apart from other men
uncompromising integrity is my standard my character and honor are steadfast my
word is my bond we expect to be we expect to lead and be
led in the absence of orders I will take charge lead my teammates and accomplish
the mission I lead by example in all situations I will never quit
I persevere and thrive on adversity my nation expects me to be physically
harder and mentally stronger than my enemies
if knocked down I will get back up every time I will draw on every remaining
ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission
I am never out of the fight we demand discipline we expect
innovation the lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me
my technical skill tactical proficiency and attention to detail my training is
never complete we train for war and fight to win I stand ready to bring the
full spectrum of combat power to bear in o | years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way so rolling into your next chapter and I haven't made my caveat that I always make I'm not reading this whole book right now and so when it skips around it's because I'm not reading the whole book you have to buy the book so that you can hear the whole thing and and then we're just you know you and I are going off of a bunch of tangents and which is awesome but you know the book that has so many great details in it and the stories are so clear and they're real personal too so you got to buy the book to get that got to buy the book you gotta buy the book so the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units are relentless | 8 | 4 | 6 | years earlier and she's the one there consoling Tara and it's just that that's the type of community that the SEAL Teams is blessed with and you know it's it is it is a true blessing and it's unique I wish were broader I wish we could say you know I talked to other friends and other and other communities that it doesn't seem it's not as good and I wish it was I wish we should all strive to just to take care of each other in that way | the next chapter which you mentioned earlier is called who's your hero and I'm gonna jump to this part right here where you talking about the SEAL Teams it says the SEAL Teams like any like many military units are relentless | 8,4,6 | 2,1,3 | 8 | 4 | 6 | 2 | 1 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool | 6 | 4 | 8 | out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus | you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool | 7,5,8 | 5,3,6 | 7 | 5 | 8 | 5 | 3 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in | 8 | 6 | 4 | kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. | you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in | 6,5,8 | -5,-3,-2 | 6 | 5 | 8 | -5 | -3 | -2 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much | 10 | 10 | 10 | sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general | do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting | 2,-1,6 | 4,2,3 | 2 | -1 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to | -2 | 4 | 8 | it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to | No relevant speech extracted | 3,4,7 | 0,0,0 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of | -5 | 8 | -3 | 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of | well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit | 2,-5,-3 | 6,4,8 | 2 | -5 | -3 | 6 | 4 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase | -5 | 6 | 4 | the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years | oh you talking about the scalar again | 3,-1,8 | 1,2,4 | 3 | -1 | 8 | 1 | 2 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd | -2 | 4 | 6 | is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd | now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp | -2,-5,-3 | 3,5,8 | -2 | -5 | -3 | 3 | 5 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows | -2 | 4 | 6 | reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply | you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's universally bad it's awful | 2,4,6 | -5,-3,-2 | 2 | 4 | 6 | -5 | -3 | -2 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your | -5 | 7 | 4 | into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right | you're the jujitsu | 2,-5,8 | 0,2,5 | 2 | -5 | 8 | 0 | 2 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free | 5 | 7 | 8 | can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments | i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free | 2,4,6 | 1,3,4 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 1 | 3 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the | -5 | 8 | 7 | means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the | he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle | 2,5,8 | 0,-1,2 | 2 | 5 | 8 | 0 | -1 | 2 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you | 8 | 6 | 4 | lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on | you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you | 8,6,5 | 4,5,8 | 8 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for | 8 | 6 | 4 | everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering | your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for | 3,-5,-2 | 8,6,5 | 3 | -5 | -2 | 8 | 6 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally | 8 | 6 | 4 | nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave | do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally | 8,7,9 | 2,-1,4 | 8 | 7 | 9 | 2 | -1 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC43pZkpTec | 14,214 | mC43pZkpTec | 2022-04-14 00:00:00 | remember george washington you know how he died well-meaning physicians bled him to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective the following is a conversation with michael saylor one of the most prominent and brilliant bitcoin proponents in the world he is the ceo of microstrategy founder of sailor academy graduate of mit and michael is one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers i've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with he can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization in human history and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains markets governments and financial systems this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's michael saylor let's start with a big question of truth and wisdom when advanced humans or aliens or ai systems let's say five to ten centuries from now look back at earth on this early 21st century how much do you think they would say we understood about money and economics or even about engineering science life death meaning intelligence consciousness all the big interesting questions i think they would uh probably give us a b minus on engineering on all the engineering things the hard sciences the passing grade like we're doing okay we're working our way through rockets and jets and electric cars and uh electricity transport systems and nuclear power and space flight and the like and you know if you if you look at the walls that uh grace the great court at mit it's full of all the great thinkers and and they're all pretty admirable you know if you could be with newton or gauss or madame curie or einstein you know you would respect them i would say they'd give us like a a d minus on economics like you know an f plus or a d minus you you have an optimistic vision first of all optimistic vision of engineering because everybody you've listed not everybody most people you've listed is just over the past couple of centuries and maybe it stretches a little farther back but mostly all the cool stuff we've done in engineering is the past couple centuries i mean archimedes you know had his virtues you know i studied the history of science at mit and i also studied aerospace engineering and and so i clearly have a bias in favor of science and if i look at the past 10 000 years and i consider all of the philosophy and the politics and their impact on the human condition i think it's a wash for every politician that came up with a good idea another politician came up with a bad idea yeah right and it's not clear to me that you know most of the political and philosophical you know contributions to the to the human race and the human conditions have advanced so much i mean we're still taking you know taking guidance and admiring aristotle and plato and seneca and the like and on the other hand you know if you think about uh what has made the human condition better fire water harnessing of wind energy like try to row across an ocean right not easy and for people who are just listening or watching there's a beautiful sexy ship from 16 century this is a 19th century handmade model of a 17th century sailing ship which is of the type that the dutch east india's company used to sail the world and trade so that was made you know the original was made sometime in the 1600s and then this model is made in the 19th century by individuals both the model and the ship itself is engineering at its best and just imagine just like raucous flying out to space how much hope this filled people with exploring the unknown going into the mystery uh both the entrepreneurs and the business people and the engineers and just humans what's out there what's out there to be discovered yeah the metaphor of human beings leaving shore or sailing across the horizon risking their lives in pursuit of a better life is an incredibly powerful one in 1900 i suppose the average life expectancy is 50. during the revolutionary war you know while our founding fathers were fighting to establish you know life liberty pursuit of happiness the constitution average life expectancy of it's like 32. some between 32 and 36. so all the sound in the fury doesn't make you live past 32 but what does right antibiotics conquest of infectious diseases if we understand the science of of infectious disease they're you know sterilizing a knife and harnessing antibiotics gets you from 50 to 70 and that happened fast right that happens from 1900 to 1950 or something like that and i i think if you look look at the human condition you ever get on one of those rowing machines where they actually keep track of your watts output when you're on that yeah you know it's like 200 is a lot okay 200 is a lot so a kilowatt hour is like all the energy that a human a trained athlete can deliver in a day and probably not one percent of the people in the in the world could deliver a kilowatt hour in a day and the commercial value of a kilowatt hour the retail value is 11 cents today and uh the wholesale value is two cents and so you have to look at the contribution of politicians and philosophers and economists to the human condition and and it's it's like at best to wash one way or the other and then if you look at the contribution of john d rockefeller when he delivered you a barrel of oil yeah and then you know the energy and in oil liquid energy or the contribution of tesla you know as we deliver electricity you know and what's the impact of the human condition if i have electric power if i have chemical power if i have wind energy if i if i can actually set up a reservoir create a dam spin a turbine and generate energy from a hydraulic source that's extraordinary right and and so our ability to cross the ocean our ability to grow food our ability to live it's it's technology that gets the human race from you know a brutal life where life expectancy is 30 to a world where life expectancy is 80. you gave a d minus the economist so are they two like the politicians awash in terms of there's good ideas and bad ideas and and that tiny delta between good and and bad is how you squeak past the f plus onto the d minus territory i think most economic ideas are bad ideas like most you know like um take us back to mit and you want to solve uh a fluid dynamics problem like like design the shape of the whole of that ship or you want to design an airfoil a wing or if you want to design an engine or a a nozzle and a rocket ship you wouldn't do it with simple arithmetic you wouldn't do it with a scalar there's not a single number right is vector it's vector math you know computational fluid dynamics is n dimensional higher level math you know complicated stuff so when when an economist says the inflation rate is two percent that's a scalar and when an economist says it's not a problem to print more money because the velocity of the money is very low the monetary velocity is low that's another scalar okay so the truth of the matter is inflation is not a scalar inflation is an in-dimensional vector money velocity is not a scalar um develo saying what's the velocity of money oh oh it's slow or it's fast it ignores the question of what medium is the money moving through in the same way that you know what's the speed of sound okay well what is sound right sound you know sound is uh is a compression wave it's energy uh moving through a medium but the speed is different so for example the speed of sound through air is different than the speed of sound through water and and a sound moves faster through water it moves faster through a solid and it moves faster to a stiffer solid so there isn't one what is the fundamental problem with the way economists reduce the world down to a model is it too simple or is it just even the first principles of constructing the model is wrong i think that uh the fundamental problem is if you see the world as a scalar you simply pick the one number which is which supports whatever you want to do and you ignore the universe of other consequences from your behavior in general i don't know if you've heard of like eric watson has been talking about this with gage theory so different different kinds of approaches from the physics world from the mathematical world to extend past this scalar view of economics so gauge theory is one way that comes from physics do you find that a way of exploring economics interesting so outside of cryptocurrency outside of the actual technologies and so on just analysis of how economics works do you find that interesting yeah i i think that if we're going to want to really make any scientific progress in economics we have to apply much much more computationally intensive and richer forms of mathematics so simulation perhaps or yeah you know when i was at mit i studied system dynamics you know they taught it at the sloan school it was developed by jay forrester who who who was an extraordinary computer scientist and when we've created models of economic behavior they were all multi-dimensional non-linear models so if you want to describe how anything works in the real world you have to start with the concept of feedback if i double the price of something demand will fall and attempts to to create supply will increase and there will be a delay before the capacity increases there'll be an instant demand change and there'll be rippling effects throughout every other segment of the economy downstream and upstream of such thing so it's kind of common sense but most economics most classical economics it's always you know taught with linear models you know fairly simplistic linear models and oftentimes even i'm really shocked today that the entire mainstream dialogue of economics has been captured by scalar arithmetic for example if if you read you know read any article in new york times or the wall street journal right they just refer to there's an inflation number or the the cpi or the inflation rate is x and if you look at all the historic studies of the impact of inflation generally they're all based upon the idea that inflation equals cpi and then they try to extrapolate from that and you just get nowhere with it so at the very least we should be considering inflation and other economics concept as a non-linear dynamical system so non-linearity and also just embracing the full complexity of just how the variables interact maybe through simulation maybe some have some interesting models around that wouldn't it be refreshing if somebody for once published a table of the change in price of every product every service and every asset in every place over time you said table some of that also is the task of visualization how to extract from this complex set of numbers patterns that uh somehow indicate something fundamental about what's happening so like each summarization of data is still important perhaps summarization not down to a single scalar value but looking at that whole sea of numbers you have to find patterns like what is inflation in a particular sector what is maybe uh change over time maybe different geographical regions you know things of that nature i think that's kind of i don't know even what that task is uh you know that's what you could look at machine learning you can look at ai with that perspective which is like how do you represent what's happening efficiently as efficiently as possible that's never going to be a single number but it might be a compressed model that captures something something beautiful something fundamental about what's happening it's an opportunity for sure right um you know if we take um for example during the pandemic the the response of the political apparatus was to lower interest rates to zero and to start to start buying assets in essence printing money and the defense was there's no inflation yeah but of course you had one part of the economy where it was locked down so it was illegal to buy anything but you couldn't you know it was either illegal or it was impractical so it would be impossible for demand to manifest so of course there is no inflation on the other hand there was instantaneous immediate inflation in another part of the economy for example um you lowered the interest rates uh to zero one point we saw the uh the swap rate on the 30-year note go to 72 basis points okay that means that the value of a long dated bond immediately inflates so the bond market had hyper inflation within minutes of these financial decisions the asset market had hyperinflation we had what you call a case shape recovery what we affectionately call a shake k shape recovery main street shutdown wall street recovered all within six weeks the inflation was in the assets like in the stocks in the bonds uh you know if you look today you see that a typical house according to case-shiller index today is up 19.2 percent year-over-year so if you're a first-time home buyer the inflation rate is 19 percent uh the formal cpi announced a 7.9 percent you can pretty much create any inflation rate you want by constructing a market basket a weighted basket of products or services or assets that yield you the answer i think that you know the fundamental failing of economist is is first of all they don't really have a term for asset inflation right what's an asset what's asset hyperinflation you mentioned bond market swap rate and asset is where the all majority of the hyperinflation happened what's inflation what's hyperinflation what's an asset what's an asset market i'm going to ask so many dumb questions in the conventional economic world you would you would treat inflation as uh the rate of increase in price of a market basket of consumer products defined by a government agency so they have a like traditional things that a regular consumer would be buying the government selects like toilet paper food toaster refrigerator electronics all that kind of stuff and it's like a representative a basket of goods that lead to a content existence on this earth for a regular consumer they define a synthetic metric right i mean i i'm going to say you should have a thousand square foot apartment and you should have a used car and you should eat you know three hamburgers a week now ten years go by and the apartment costs more i could adjust the market basket by a you know they call them hedonic adjustments i could decide that it used to be in 1970 to a thousand square feet but in the year 2020 you only need 700 square feet because we've many miniaturized televisions and we've got more efficient electric appliances and because things have collapsed into the iphone you just don't need as much space so now i you know it may be that the apartment costs 50 percent more but after the hedonic adjustment there is no inflation because i just downgraded the expectation of what a normal person should have so the synthetic nature of the metric allows for manipulation by people in power pretty much i guess my criticism of economist is rather than embracing inflation based upon its fundamental idea which is the rate at which the price of things go up right they've been captured by a mainstream conventional thinking to immediately equate inflation to the government issued cpi or government-issued pce or government-issued ppi measure which was never the rate at which things go up it's simply the rate at which a synthetic basket of products and services the government wishes to track go up now the problem with that is is two big things one thing is the government gets to create the market basket and so they keep changing what's in the basket over time so i mean if if i keep tr if i said three years ago you should go see ten concerts a year and the concert tickets now cost two hundred dollars each now it's two thousand dollars a year to go see concerts now i'm in charge of calculating inflation so i redefine you know your entertainment quota for the year to be eight netflix streaming concerts and now they don't cost two thousand dollars they cost nothing and there is no inflation but you don't get your concerts right so the problem starts with continually changing the definition of the market basket but in my opinion that's not the biggest problem the more the more egregious problem is the the fundamental idea that assets aren't products or services assets can't be inflated with an asset a house a share of apple stock um a bond um any a bitcoin is an asset um or uh a picasso painting so not a consumable good not a uh not not an apple that you can eat right if i throw away an asset then uh i'm not on the hook to track the inflation rate for it so what happens if i change the policy such that let's take the class example a million dollar bond at a five percent interest rate gives you fifty thousand dollars a year in risk-free income you might retire on fifty thousand dollars a year in a low-cost jurisdiction so the cost of social security or early retirement is one million dollars when the interest rate is five percent uh during the the crisis of march of 2020 the interest rate went on a 10-year bond went to 50 basis points okay so now the cost of that bond is 10 million dollars okay the cost of social security went from a million dollars to 10 million dollars so if you wanted to work your entire life save money and then retire risk-free and live happily ever after on a 50 000 salary living on a beach in mexico wherever you wanted to go you had hyperinflation the cost of your aspiration increased by a factor of 10 over the course of you know some amount of time in fact in that case that was like over the course of about 12 years right as the inflation rate ground down the asset traded up but the you know the conventional view is oh that's not a problem because it's good that that assets it's good that the bond is highly priced because we own the bond or um what's the problem with the inflation rate in housing being 19 it's an awful problem for a 22 year old that's starting their first job that's saving money to buy a house but it would be characterized as a benefit to society by a conventional economist who would say well housing asset values are higher because of interest rate fluctuation and now the economy's got more wealth and uh and so that's that's viewed as a benefit so the what's being missed here like the suffering of the average person or the uh the struggle the suffering the pain of the average person like metrics that captured that within the economic system is that is it when you talk about one way to say it is a conventional view of inflation as cpi understates the human misery that's in inflicted upon the working class and and on uh mainstream companies uh by uh by the political class and so it's a massive shift of wealth from the working class to the property class it's a massive shift of power from the free market uh to the centrally governed or the controlled market it's a massive shift of power from the people to the government and and maybe one one more illustrative point here alexis is uh what do you think the inflation rate's been for the past 100 years oh you talking about the scalar again if you if you took a survey of everybody on the street and you asked them what do they think inflation was uh what is it you know remember when jerome powell said our target's two percent but we're not there if you go around the corner i have uh posted the deed to this house sold in 1930. okay and uh the number on that deed is one hundred thousand dollars 1930. and if you go on zillow and you get the z estimate is it higher than that no 30 million 500 000 yeah so that's uh 92 years 1930 or 2022 and and in 92 years we've had 305 x increase in price of the house now if you actually back calculate you can you come to a conclusion that the inflation rate was approximately six and a half percent a year every year for 92 years okay and and there's nobody nobody in government no conventional economist that would ever admit to an inflation rate of seven percent a year in the us dollar over the last century now if you if you uh dig deeper i mean one one guy that's done a great job working on this is seifidin amus who wrote who wrote the book the bitcoin standard and he notes that on average it looks like the inflation rate and the money supply is about seven percent a year all the way up to the year 2020 if you look at the s p index which is a market basket of scarce desirable stocks it returned about 10 percent if you talk to 10 a year for 100 years the money supply is expanding at 7 100 years if you actually talk to economists or you look at the the economy and you ask the question how fast does the economy grow in its entirety year over year generally about two to three percent like the sum total impact of all this technology and human ingenuity might get you a two and a half three percent improvement a year as measured by gdp is that are you okay with that not sure i'm not sure i'd go that far yet but i would just say that if you had the human race doing stuff yeah and if you ask the question how much more efficiently will we do the stuff next year than this year or how what's the value of all of our innovations and inventions and investments in the past 12 months you'd be hard-pressed to say we get two percent better typical investor thinks they they're 10 better every year so if you look at what's going on really when you're holding a million dollars of stocks and you're getting a 10 gain a year you really get a seven percent expansion of the money supply you're getting a two or three percent gain under best circumstances and another way to say that is if the money supply stopped expanding at seven percent a year the s p yield might be three percent and not ten percent it probably should be now that that gets you to start to ask a bunch of other fundamental questions like if i borrow a billion dollars and pay three percent interest and the money supply expands at seven to ten percent a year and i ended up making a ten percent return on a you know billion dollar investment paying three percent interest is that fair and who who suffered so that i could do that because in an environment where you're just inflating the money supply and you're holding the assets constant it stands the reason that the price of all the assets is going to appreciate somewhat proportional to the money supply and the difference in asset appreciations is going to be a function of the scarce desirable quality of the assets and to what extent can i make more of them and to what extent are they are they truly limited in supply yeah so we'll we'll get to a lot of the words you said there the scarcity uh and it's so good connected to how limited they are and the value of those assets but you also said so the expansion of the money supply you just put another way is printing money and so is is that always bad the expansion of the money supply is this just uh to put some terms on the table so we understand them um you nonchalantly say it's always the on average expanding every year the money supply is expanding every year by seven percent that's a bad thing that's a universally bad thing it's awful well i guess i guess to be precise uh it's the currency that i mean my money uh i would say money is monetary energy or economic energy and the economic energy has to find its way into a medium so if you want to move it rapidly as a medium of exchange has to find its way into currency but the money can also flow into property like a house or gold if the money flows into property it'll probably hold its value much better if the money flows into currency right if you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305 x return over 92 years but if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement you would have lost 99.7 percent of your wealth over the same time period so um so the the expansion of the currency creates uh creates a massive inefficiency in the society what i'll call an adiabatic lapse it's what we're doing is we're bleeding the civilization to death right the antibiotic adiabatic what's that word that's adiabatic adiabatic right and aerospace engineering you want to solve any problem they they start with the phrase assume an adiabatic system and what that means is a closed system okay so i've got it i've got a container and in that container no air leaves and no air enters no energy exits or enters so it's a closed system so you got the closed system lapse okay okay i'm going to use a there's a leak in the ship i'm going to use a physical metaphor for you because you're the jujitsu right like like you got 10 pints of blood in your body and so before your next workout i'm going to take one pint from you now you're going to go exercise but you're one point you've lost 10 percent of your blood okay you're not going to perform as well it takes about one month for your body to replace the red blood platelets so what if i tell you every month you got to show up and i'm going to bleed you yeah okay so uh so if i'm draining the energy i'm drink i'm draining the blood from your body you can't perform if you adiabatic lapse is when you go up in altitude every thousand feet you lose three degrees you go 50 000 feet you're 150 degrees colder than sea level that's why you you know you look at your instruments and instead of 80 degrees your minus 70 degrees why is the temperature falling temperatures falling because it's not a closed system it's an open system as the air expands the density falls right the ener the energy per uh per cubic whatever you know falls and therefore the temperature falls right the heat's falling out of the solution so when you're inflating let's say you're inflating the money so the currency supply by six percent you're sucking six percent of the energy out of the fluid that the economy is using to function so the currency this kind of ocean of currency that's a nice way for the economy to function it's the most kind of uh it's being inefficient when you expand the money supply but it's uh that look it's the liquid i'm trying to find the right kind of adjective here it's how you do transactions at a scale of billions currency is the asset we use uh to move monetary energy around and you could use the dollar or you could use the peso or you could use the bolivar selling houses and buying houses is much more inefficient or like you can't transact between billions of people with houses yeah properties don't make such good mediums of exchange they make better stores of value and they they have utility value if it's a if it's a ship or a house or or a plane or a bushel of corn right can i zoom out just for yeah can we zoom out keep zooming out until we reach the origin of human civilization but on the way ask you gave economists a d-minus i'm not even going to ask you what you give to governments uh do you think their failure economist and government failure is malevolence or incompetence i think uh policymakers are well-intentioned but generally all all government policy is inflationary and all government it's inflammatory and inflationary so what i mean by that is you know when you have a policy uh pursuing uh supply chain independence if you have an energy policy if you have a labor policy if you have a trade policy if you have a you know any any kind of foreign policy a domestic policy a manufacturing policy every one of these medical policy every one of these policies interferes with the free market and and generally prevents some rational actor from doing it in a cheaper more efficient way so when you layer them on top of each other they all have to be paid for if you want to shut down the entire economy for a year you have to pay for it right if you want to fight a war you have to pay for it right if you don't want to use oil or natural gas you have to pay for it if you don't want to manufacture semiconductors in china and you want to manufacture them in the u.s you got to pay for it if i rebuild the entire supply chain in pennsylvania and i hire a bunch of employees and then i unionize the employees then not only am i i idle the factory in the far east it goes to 50 capacity so so whatever it sells it has to raise the price on and then i drive up the cost of labor for every other manufacturer in the us because i competing against them right i'm changing their conditions so everything gets less efficient everything gets more expensive and of course the government couldn't really pay for uh its policies and its wars with taxes we didn't pay for world war one with tax we didn't pay for world war ii with tax we didn't pay for vietnam with tax in fact you know when you trace this what you realize is the government never pays for all of its policies with taxes to ask to raise the taxes to truly transparently pay for the things you're doing with taxes with taxpayer money because they feel that's one interpretation or it's just too transparent like if people if people understood the the the true cost of war they wouldn't want to go to war if you were told that you would lose 95 of your assets you know and 90 of everything you will be ever will be taken from you you might reprioritize your thought about a given policy and you might not vote for that politician but you're still saying incompetence not malevolence so fundamentally government creates a bureaucracy of incompetence is kind of how you look at it i think a lack of humility right like uh like if if people had more humility then they would realize humility about how little they know how little they understand about the function of complexity this is the phrase from queen eastwood's movie unforgiven where he says a man's got to know his limitations [Laughter] i i think that a lot of people overestimate what they can accomplish and experience experience in life causes you to uh to reevaluate that so i mean i've done a lot of things in my life and and generally my mistakes were always my good ideas that i enthusiastically pursued to the detriment of my great ideas that required 150 of my attention to prosper so i think people pursue too many good ideas and you know they all sound good but there's just a limit to to what you can accomplish and everybody underestimates the challenges of of implementing an idea right and uh and they always overestimate the benefits of the pursuit of that so i think it's an overconfidence that causes an over exuberance and pursuit of policies and as the ambition of the government expands so must the currency supply you know i could say the money survival let's say the currency supply um you can triple the number of pesos in the economy but it doesn't triple uh the amount of manufacturing capacity in the said economy and it doesn't triple the amount of assets in the economy it just triples the pesos so as you increase the currency supply then the price of all those scarce desirable things will tend to go up rapidly and the confidence of all of the institutions the corporations and the individual actors and trading partners will will collapse if we take a tangent on a tangent and we will return soon to the uh the big human civilization question uh so if government naturally wants to buy stuff it can't afford what's the best form of government uh anarchism libertarianism so not even go there's not even armies there's no borders that's anarchism the least the smallest possible the smallest possible the last the best government would be the least and the debate will be over that when you think about the stuff do you think about okay government is the way it is i as a person that can generate great ideas how do i operate in this world or do you also think about the big picture if we start a new civilization somewhere on mars do you think about what's the ultimate form of government what's uh at least a promising thing to try you know um i have laser eyes on my profile on twitter what does that mean and the significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference yes and um if i look at the civilization um i would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective half 50 i don't know it's worth 500 trillion dollars worth of problems like money uh money represents all the economic energy and the civilization and it kind of equates to all the products all the services and all the assets that we have and we're ever gonna have so that's half the other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and and military and political and philosophical and you know and uh and i think that there are a lot of different solutions to all those problems and they're all they are all uh honorable professions and and they all merit a lifetime of consideration for the specialist in all those areas i i think that what i could offer it's constructive is inflation is completely misunderstood it's a much bigger problem than we understand it to be we need to introduce engineering and science techniques into economics if we want to further the human condition all government policy is inflationary you know and another pernicious myth is uh inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena so you know a famous quote by milton friedman i believe it's like it's a monetary phenomena that is inflation comes from expanding the currency supply it's a nice phrase and it's oftentimes quoted by people that are anti-inflation but again it it just signifies a lack of appreciation of what the issue is inflation is if i if i had a currency which was completely non-inflationary if if i never printed another dollar and if i eliminated fractional reserve banking from the face of the earth we'd still have inflation and we'd have inflation as long as we have government that that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in the in themselves inflationary and generally they all are so in general inflationary is the big characteristic of human nature that governments collection of groups that have power over others and allocate other people's resources will try to intentionally or not hide the costs of those allocations like in some tricky ways whatever the options ever available you know hiding the cost is like is like the the tertiary thing like the the primary goal is the government will attempt to do good right and that's the fundament that's the primary problem they will attempt to do good and they will and they will do it and they will do good and imperfectly and they will create oftentimes uh as much damage more damage than the good they do most government policy will be iatrogenic it will it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it but it is what it is the secondary uh the secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply without realizing that they're uh they're actually paying for it in in a sub-optimal fashion they'll collapse their own currencies while they attempt to do good the the tertiary issue is they will mismeasure how badly they're collapsing the currency so for example if you go to the bureau of labor statistics you know and look at the numbers printed by the fed they'll say oh it looks like the dollar has lost 95 of its purchasing power over 100 years okay they sort of fess up there's a problem but they make it 95 percent loss over 100 years what they don't do is realize it's a 99.7 loss over 80 years so they will mismeasure just the horrific extent of uh the monetary policy in pursuit of the foreign policy and the domestic policy which they they they overestimate their budget and their means to accomplish their ends and they underestimate the cost and and they're oblivious to the horrific damage that they do to the civilization because the mental models that they use that are conventionally taught are wrong right the mental model that like it's okay we can print all this money because the velocity of the money is low right because money velocity is a scalar and inflation is the scalar and we don't see two percent inflation yet and the money velocity is low and so it's okay if we print trillions of dollars well the money velocity was immediate right the velocity of money through the crypto economy is 10 000 times faster than the velocity of money through the consumer economy right it's like i think nick pointed out when you spoke to him he said it takes two months for a credit card transaction to settle right so you want to spend a million dollars in the consumer economy you can move it six times a year you you put a million dollars into gold gold will sit in a vault for a decade okay so the velocity of money through gold is 0.1 you put the money in the stock market and you can trade it once a week the settlement is t plus 2 maybe you get to two to one leverage you might get to a money velocity of a hundred a year in the stock market you put your money into the crypto economy and these people are settling every four hours and and you know if you're offshore they're trading with 20x leverage so if you if you settle every day and you trade the 20x leverage you just went to 7 000. yeah so the la the velocity of the money varies i think the politicians they they don't really understand inflation and they don't understand economics but but you can't blame them because the economists don't understand economics because the because if they did they would be creating multi-variate computer simulations where they actually put in the price of every piece of housing in every city in the world the full array of foods and the full array of products and the full array of assets and then on a monthly basis they would publish all those results and where and that's a high bandwidth requirement and i i think that people don't really want to embrace it and and also there's the most pernicious thing there's that phrase you know you can't tell people what to think but you can tell them what to think about the most pernicious thing is is i get you to misunderstand the phenomena so that even when it's happening to you you don't appreciate that it's a bad thing and you think it's a good thing so if housing prices are going up 20 percent year over year and i say this is great for the american public because most most of them are home owners then i have i've misrepresented a phenomena inflation is 20 not 7 percent and then i've misrepresented it as being a positive rather than a negative and people will stare at it and you could even show them their house on fire and they would perceive it as being great because it's warming them up and they're going to save on their heat costs it does seem that the cruder the model whether it's economics whether it's psychology the easier it is to weave whatever the heck narrative you want and not in a malicious way but just like it's it's some some kind of like uh emergent phenomena this narrative thing that we tell ourselves so you can tell any kind of story about inflation inflation is good inflation is bad like the cruder the model the easier it is to tell a narrative about it and that's what the so like if you take an engineering approach it's i feel like it becomes more and more difficult to run away from sort of a true deep understanding of the dynamics of the system i mean honestly if you went to 100 people on the street you asked them to define inflation how many would how many would say it's a vector tracking the change in price of every product service asset in the world over time no not me no if you if you went to them and you said you know do you think two percent inflation a year is good or bad the majority would probably say well here it's good you know the majority of economists would say two percent inflation a year is good and of course there's look at the ship next to us what if i told you that the ship leaked two percent right of its volume every something right the ship is rotting two percent a year that means the useful life of the ship is 50 years now ironically that's true like a wooden ship had a 50 year to 100 year life 100b long 50 years not unlikely so when we built ships out of wood they had a useful life of about 50 years and then they sunk they rotted there's nothing good about it right you build a ship out of steel you know and it's zero as opposed to two percent degradation and how much better is zero percent versus two percent well two percent means you have a useful life of you know it's half-life of 35 years 2 2 is a half-life of 35 years that's basically the half-life of money in gold if i store your life force in gold under perfect circumstances you have a useful life at 35 years zero percent is a useful life of forever so zero percent is immortal two percent is 35 years average life expectancy so that the idea that you would think the life expectancy of the currency and the civilization should be 35 years instead of forever is is kind of a silly notion but the tragic notion is it was it was you know seven into seventy or ten years it's the money has had a half-life of ten years except for the fact that in weak societies in in argentina or the like the half-life of the money is three to four years in venezuela one year so the united states dollar and the united states economic system was the most successful economic system in the last hundred years in the world we won every war we were the world superpower our currency lost 99.7 percent of its value and that means horrifically every other currency lost everything right in essence the the other ones were 99.9 except for most that were 100 because they all completely failed and uh you know you've got a you've got a mainstream economic community you know that thinks that inflation is a number and two percent is desirable it's it's it's kind of like you know remember george washington you know how he died no well-meaning physicians bled him to death okay the last thing in the world you would want to do to a sick person is bleed them right in the modern world i think we understand that that oxygen is carried by the blood cells and and you know and if uh you know there's that phrase right uh a triage phrase what's the first thing you do in an injury stop the bleeding single first thing right you show up after any action i look at you stop the bleeding because you're going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out so it strikes me as being ironic that orthodox conventional wisdom was bleed the patient to death and this was the most important patient in the country maybe in the history of the country and it's and we bled him to death trying to help him so when you're actually inflating the money supply at seven percent but you're calling it two percent because you want to help the economy you're literally bleeding the the free market to death but the sad fact is george washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good and the majority of of uh the society most companies most most conventional thinkers you know the working class they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death believe they they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective and their understanding of energy and engineering and and uh and the economics that are at play is uh is crippled by these mental models but that's both the bug and the feature of human civilization that ideas take hold they unite us we believe in them uh and we make a lot of cool stuff happen by as an average sort of just the fact of the matter a lot of people believe the same thing they get together and they get some done because they believe that thing and then some ideas can be really bad and really destructive but on average the ideas seem to be progressing in in a direction of good let me just step back what the hell are we doing here us humans on this earth how do you think of humans how special are humans how did human civilization originate on this earth and what is this human project that we're all taking on you mentioned fire and water and apparently bleeding you to death is not a good idea i thought always thought you can get the demons out in that way but um that was a recent invention so what what's this thing we're doing here i think what distinguishes uh human beings from all the other creatures on the earth is is our ability to engineer we're engineers right to solve problems or just build incredible cool things engineering harnessing energy and technique to make the world a better place than you found it right from the point that we actually started to play with fire right that was a big leap forward uh harnessing the power of of kinetic energy and missiles another another step forward every city built on water why water well water's bringing energy right if you actually if you actually put a turbine you know on a river or you uh or you capture a change in elevation of water you've literally harnessed gravitational energy but you know water is also bringing you food it's also giving you you know a cheap form of uh getting rid of your waste it's also giving you free transportation you want to move one ton blocks around you want to move them in water so i think i mean the the the human story is really the story of engineering a better world and and uh the rise in the human condition is determined by those uh groups of people those civilizations that were best at harnessing energy right if you if you look you know the greek civilization they built it around around ports and seaports and and water and created a trading network the romans were really good at harnessing all sorts of of engineering i mean the aqueducts are a great example if you go to any big city you travel through cities in the med you find that you know the carrying capacity of the city or the island is 5 000 people without running water and then if you can find a way to bring water to it increases by a factor of 10 and so human flourishing is really only possible through that channeling of energy right that eventually takes the the form of air power right i mean that ship i mean look at the intricacy of those sales right i mean it's just the model is intricate now think about all of the experimentation that took place to figure out how many sales to put on that ship and how to rig them and how to repair them and how to operate them there's thousands of lives spent thinking through all the tiny little details all to increase the efficiency of this the effectiveness the efficiency of this ship as it sails through water and we should also note there's a bunch of cannons on the side so obviously another form of en engineering right energy harnessing with explosives to achieve what end that's another discussion exactly suppose we're trying to get off the planet right i mean well there's a selection mechanism going on so natural selection this whatever however evolution works it seems that one of the interesting inventions on earth was the predator prey dynamic that you want to be the bigger fish that violence seems to serve a useful purpose if you look at earth as a whole we as humans now like to think of violence as really a bad thing it seems to be one of the amazing things about humans is we're ultimately tend towards cooperation we want to we like peace uh if you just look at history we want things to be nice and calm and um but just wars break out every once in a while and lead to immense suffering and destruction and so on and they have a kind of uh like resetting the palette effect it's it's one that's full of just immeasurable human suffering but it's like a way to start over we're called the apex predator on the planet and i i googled something the other day you know what's the most common form of mammal life on earth by by number of organisms count by count and the answer that came back was human beings i was shocked i couldn't believe it right it says like apparently if we're just looking at mammals the answer was human beings are the most common which was very interesting to me uh i almost didn't believe it but i was trying to you know eight billion or so human beings there's no other mammal that's got more than eight billion if you walk through downtown edinburgh and scotland and you look up on this hill and there's castle up on the hill you know and you talk to people and the story is oh yeah well that was uh that was a british casual before it was a scottish castle before it was pick castle before as a roman castle before it was you know some other celtic castle before you know then they found 13 prehistoric castles buried one under the other under the other and you get to you get the conclusion that a hundred thousand years ago somebody showed up and grabbed the high point the apex of the city and they built a stronghold there and they flourished and their family flourished and their tribe flourished until someone came along and knocked him off the hill and it's been a a nonstop never ending fight by the the aggressive most powerful entity family organization municipality tribe whatever off the hill for that one hill going back since time and memorial and you know you scratch your head and and you think it seems like it's like just this ending but does not lead if you just all kinds of metrics that seems to improve the quality of our cannons and ships as a result like it seems that war just like your laser eyes focuses the mind on the engineering tasks it is that and and and it does remind you that the winner is always the most powerful and and we we throw that phrase out but no one thinks about what that phrase means like like who's the most powerful or the you know or the most powerful side one but they don't think about it and they think about power energy delivered in a period of time and then you think a guy with a spear is more powerful than someone with their fist and someone with a bow and arrow is more powerful than the person with the spear and then you realize that somebody with bronze is more powerful than without and steel is more powerful than bronze and if you look at the romans you know they persevered you know with artillery and they could stand off from 800 meters and blast you to smithereens right they you know you study the history of the balearic slingers right and you know you think we invented bullets but they they invented bullets to put in slings thousands of years ago they could have stood off 500 meters and put a hole in your head right and so there was never a time when uh when humanity wasn't vying to come up with an asymmetric form of projecting their own power via technology an absolute power is when a leader is able to control a large amount of uh humans they're facing the same direction working in the same direction to leverage uh energy the most organized society wins yeah when the romans were were dominating everybody they were the most organized civilization in europe and as long as they stayed organized they dominated and at some point they over expanded and got disorganized and they collapsed and uh i guess you could say that you know the struggle of the human condition it catalyzes the development of new technologies one after the other it penalizes anybody that rejects ocean power right gets penalized you reject artillery you get penalized you reject atomic power you get penalized if you reject digital power cyber power you get penalized and uh and the the underlying control of the property keeps shifting hands from you know one institution or one government to another based upon how rationally they're able to channel that energy and how well organized or coordinated they are well that's really interesting thing about both the human mind and governments that they once they get a few good and companies once they get a few good ideas they seem to stick with them they reject new ideas it's almost uh whether that's emergent or however that evolved it seems to have a really interesting effect because when you're young you fight for the new ideas you push them through then a few of us humans find success then we get complacent we take over the world using that new idea and then the the the new young person with the better new idea uh challenges you and you uh as opposed to pivoting you stick with the old and lose because of it and that's how empires collapse and it's just both at the individual level that happens when two academics fighting about ideas or something like that and at the uh at the human civilization level governments they hold on to the ideas of old it's fascinating yeah an ever persistent theme in the history of science is the paradigm shift and the paradigms shift when the old guard dies and a new generation arrives or the paradigm shifts when there's a war and everyone that disagrees with the idea of aviation finds bombs dropping on their head or everyone that disagrees with whatever your technology is has a rude awakening and if they totally disagree their society collapses and they're replaced by that new thing a lot of the engineering you talked about had to do with ships and cannons and leveraging water what about this whole digital thing that's happening been happening over the past century is that still engineering your mind you're starting to operate in these bits of information i think there's two big ideas uh the first wave of ideas were digital information and that was the internet way been running since 1990 or so for 30 years and the second wave is digital energy so if i look at digital information this idea that we want to digitally transform a book i'm going to de-materialize every book in this room into bits and then i'm going to deliver a copy of the entire library to a billion people and i'm going to do it for pretty much de minimis electricity if i can dematerialize music books education entertainment maps right that that uh is an incredibly like exothermic transaction it gives it's a crystallization when we collapse into a lower energy state as a civilization we give off massive amounts of energy like if you look at what carnegie did the richest man in the world created libraries everywhere at the time and he gave away his entire fortune and now we can give a better library to every six year old for nothing and so what's the value of giving a million books to a eight billion people right that's that's the explosion in prosperity that comes from digital transformation and uh when we do it with maps you know i i transform the map i put it into a car you get in the car and the car drives you where you want to go with the map right and how much better is that than a rand mcnally atlas right here it's like it's like a million times better so the first wave of digital transformation was the dematerialization of all of these informational things which are non-conservative that is you know i could take beethoven's fifth symphony played for by the best orchestra in germany and i could give it to a billion people and they could play it a thousand times each at less than the cost of the one performance right so so i deliver culture and education and air addition and intelligence and insight to the entire civilization over digital rails and the consequences of the human race are first order generally good right the world is a better place it drives growth and you create these trillion dollar entities like apple and amazon and facebook and google and microsoft right that is the first wave the second wave do you mind i'm sorry to interrupt but that first wave um it feels like the impact that's positive you said the first order impact is generally positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of my father my grandfather my great-grandfather they saved every penny they had after 100 years they could have paid for one week or two weeks of mit that's how fiendishly expensive and inefficient it was so yes i went on scholarship i was lucky to have a scholarship but on the other hand i sat in the back of the 801 lecture hall and i was like right up in the rafters it's an awful experience on these like uncomfortable wooden benches and you can barely see the blackboard and you got to be there synchronously and the stuff we upload you can start it and stop it and watch it on your ipad or watch it on your computer and rewind it multiple times and sit in a comfortable chair and you can do it from anywhere on earth and it's absolutely free so i think about this and i think you want to improve the human condition you need people with post-graduate level education you need phds and i know this sounds kind of elitist but you want to cure cancer and you know you want to go to the stars fusion drive we need new propulsion right we need we need extraordinary breakthroughs in every area of basic science you know be it biology or propulsion or material science or computer science you're not doing that with an undergraduate degree you're certainly not doing it with a high school education but the cost of a phd is like a million bucks there's like 10 million phds in the world if you go do the if you check it out there's 8 billion people in the world how many people could get a phd or would want to maybe not 8 billion but a billion 500 million let's just say 500 million to a billion how do you go from 10 million to a billion highly educated people all of them specializing in and i don't have to tell you how many different fields of human endeavor there are i mean your life is interviewing these experts and there's so many right you know it's it's it's amazing so how do i give a multi-million dollar education to a billion people and there's two choices you can either endow a scholarship in which case you pay 75 000 a year okay 75 let's pay a million dollars and a million dollars a person i can do it that way and you're never even if you had a trillion dollars if you had 10 trillion dollars to throw at the problem and we've just thrown 10 trillion dollars at certain problems yeah you don't solve the problem right if i if i put 10 trillion dollars on the table and i said educate everybody give them all a phd you still wouldn't solve the problem harvard university can't educate eighteen thousand people simultaneously or eighty seven thousand or eight hundred thousand or eight million so you have to dematerialize the professor and dematerialize the experience so you put it all as streaming on demand computer generated education and you create simulations where you need to create simulations and you upload it it's like the human condition is being held back by 000 well-meaning um average algebra teachers i love them i mean please don't take offense if you're an algebra teacher but instead of 500 000 algebra teachers going through the same motion over and over again what you need is is like one or five or ten really good algebra teachers and they need to do it a billion times a day or billion times a year for free and if we do that there's no reason why you can't give infinite education certainly in science technology engineering and math right infinite education to everybody with no constraint and i i think the same is true right with just about every other thing you if you want to bring joy to the world you need digital music if you want to bring you know enlightenment to the world you need digital education if if you you know want to bring anything of consequence in the world you got to digitally transform it and then you got to manufacture it something like a hundred times more efficiently as a start but a million times more efficiently is is probably often you know that's that's hopeful maybe you have a chance and if you look at all of these uh space endeavors and everything we're thinking about getting to mars getting off the planet getting to other worlds number one thing you got to do is you got to make a fundamental breakthrough in an engine people dreamed about flying for thousands of years but until until the internal combustion engine you didn't have enough you know enough energy enough enough power in a light enough package in order to solve the problem and what and the human race has all sorts of those fundamental engines and materials and techniques that we need to master and each one of them is a lifetime of experimentation of someone capable of making a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge there are certain problems like education that could be solved through this pro process of dematerialization and by the way to give props to the 500k algebra teachers when i look at youtube for example one possible approach is each one of those 500 000 teachers probably had days and moments of brilliance and if they had ability to contribute to in the natural selection process like the market of education where the best ones rise up that's that's a really interesting way which is like the best the best day of your life the best lesson you've ever taught could be found and sort of broadcast to billions of people so all of those kinds of ideas can be made real in the digital world now traveling across planets you still can't solve that problem uh with dematerialization what you could solve potentially is dematerializing the human brain where you can transfer and transfer you like you don't need to have astronauts on the ship you can have a floppy disk carrying a human brain touching on those points you'd love for the 500 000 algebra teachers to become 500 000 math specialists and maybe they clump into 50 000 specialties as teams and they all pursue 50 000 new problems and they put their algebra teaching on autopilot that's the same that's the same as when i give you 11 cents worth of electricity and you don't have to row uh you know row a boat eight hours a day before you can eat right yes it would be a lot better you know that you would pay for your food in the first eight seconds of your day and then you could start thinking about other things right um with regard to technology you know one thing that i learned studying technology when you look at s-curves is until you start the s-curve you don't know whether you're a hundred years from viability a thousand years from viability or a few months from viability so isn't that fun that's so fun the the early part of the s curve is so fun because you don't know in 1900 you could have got any number of learned academics to give you 10 000 reasons why humans will never fly yeah right and in 1903 the wright brothers flew and by 1969 we're walking on the moon so the advance that we made in that field was extraordinary but for the hundred years and 200 years before they were just back and forth and nobody was close and um and that's the the happy part the happy part is we went from flying 20 miles an hour or whatever to flying 25 000 miles an hour in 66 years the unhappy part is i studied aeronautical engineering at mit in the 80s and in the 80s we had gulf stream aircraft we had boeing 737s we had the space shuttle and you fast forward 40 years and we pretty much had the same exact aircraft this you know that the efficiency of the engines was 20 30 percent more yeah right with we slammed into a brick wall around 69 to 75. like in fact uh you know the global express the gulf stream these are all engineered in the 70s some in the 60s that the actual the fusel | positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second what's your sense of the impact of that you know i i would say if you're a technologist philosopher the impact of a technology is so much greater on the civilization and the human condition than a non-technology that is almost not worth your trouble to bother trying to fix things a conventional way so let's take example um i have a foundation the sailor academy and the sailor academy gives away uh free education free college education to anybody on earth that wants it and we've had more than a million students and if you go when you take the physics class the lectures were by the same physics lecture that taught me physics at mit except when i was at mit the cost of the first four weeks of mit would have drained my family's life collective life savings for the first last hundred years yep like a hundred years worth of | 8 | 6 | 4 | positive it feels like it's positive in a way that nothing else in history has been positive and then we may not actually truly uh be able to understand the orders and magnitude of increase in productivity in just progress of human civilization uh until we look back centuries from now it just feels or maybe i'm like that just like just looking at the impact of wikipedia right the giving access to basic wisdom or basic knowledge and then perhaps wisdom to billions of people if you can just linger on that for a second | what's your sense of the impact of that | 8,6,9 | 2,4,3 | 8 | 6 | 9 | 2 | 4 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development | -2 | 6 | 8 | aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training | to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development | 2,-3,8 | 3,-1,9 | 2 | -3 | 8 | 3 | -1 | 9 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those | 7 | 8 | 9 | of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom | well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those | 8,6,9 | 4,3,5 | 8 | 6 | 9 | 4 | 3 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his | 6 | 4 | 8 | soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences | green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now | 5,2,7 | 8,5,4 | 5 | 2 | 7 | 8 | 5 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like | 5 | 2 | 4 | his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up | were you were you looking at the army like | 4,3,6 | 2,1,4 | 4 | 3 | 6 | 2 | 1 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort | 8 | 6 | 4 | good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military | yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember | 6,4,8 | 8,6,7 | 6 | 4 | 8 | 8 | 6 | 7 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i | 6 | 4 | 2 | bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to | no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i | 2,3,5 | 4,2,3 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up | 8 | 4 | 6 | remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week | what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida | 6,4,8 | 0,2,5 | 6 | 4 | 8 | 0 | 2 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i | 8 | 4 | 6 | i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid | hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on | 8,6,9 | 2,-1,5 | 8 | 6 | 9 | 2 | -1 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good | -2 | 4 | -3 | yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom | dad i'm just gonna live with my mom | 6,2,8 | 4,-1,6 | 6 | 2 | 8 | 4 | -1 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father | 7 | 4 | 6 | dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that | you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that | 4,2,6 | 3,1,5 | 4 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 1 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i | 3 | 4 | 6 | then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too | what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead | 3,-5,4 | 2,1,6 | 3 | -5 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i | 7 | 5 | 8 | said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever | hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do | 2,-5,4 | 6,2,5 | 2 | -5 | 4 | 6 | 2 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make | 2 | 6 | 8 | get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing | how old are you when you and lest 17 | 2,-1,6 | 0,1,3 | 2 | -1 | 6 | 0 | 1 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a | 5 | 7 | 3 | like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me | hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit | 0,-5,-2 | 0,2,4 | 0 | -5 | -2 | 0 | 2 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just | -5 | 4 | -3 | give me your orders | well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 | 0,2,5 | 2,3,8 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was | 7 | 5 | 8 | a popular character in the infantry in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began | did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it | 4,5,6 | 2,3,4 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger | 8 | 6 | 7 | because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger | how was ranger | 4,6,8 | 2,1,3 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 2 | 1 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress | 7 | 5 | 8 | the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful | yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating | 0,-5,3 | 2,-3,6 | 0 | -5 | 3 | 2 | -3 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this | 7 | 5 | 8 | down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become | what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions | 8,6,8 | 2,4,5 | 8 | 6 | 8 | 2 | 4 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't | 5 | 7 | 3 | of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't | yeah this guy is not the guy that we want | 2,4,6 | 0,-2,8 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 0 | -2 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least | -2 | 6 | 8 | knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped | hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things | 0,5,3 | 2,-1,6 | 0 | 5 | 3 | 2 | -1 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck | -2 | 6 | 8 | time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out | how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months | 8,5,9 | 3,2,5 | 8 | 5 | 9 | 3 | 2 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb | 5 | 8 | 7 | weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me | so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your head all day long well the so the the tomb | 2,5,6 | -5,7,3 | 2 | 5 | 6 | -5 | 7 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i | 7 | 5 | 8 | of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i | what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge | 2,5,6 | -1,3,4 | 2 | 5 | 6 | -1 | 3 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and | 7 | 5 | 4 | have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this | how long did you have that job for | 3,5,4 | 2,1,3 | 3 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like | -2 | 8 | 4 | it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation | but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down | -5,8,3 | 2,4,6 | -5 | 8 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry | 6 | 8 | 4 | i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like | you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like | 3,7,5 | -2,1,-3 | 3 | 7 | 5 | -2 | 1 | -3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing | 7 | 5 | 3 | line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down | what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing | 3,6,8 | 2,-3,5 | 3 | 6 | 8 | 2 | -3 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to | -2 | 6 | -5 | today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine | hey students i want you to | 2,4,8 | 8,6,9 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 8 | 6 | 9 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to | 7 | 5 | 8 | so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission | yeah pretty much yeah | 6,3,8 | 2,0,5 | 6 | 3 | 8 | 2 | 0 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude | 8 | 6 | 4 | it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience | wait what martial arts did you grow up in | 8,6,8 | 2,4,3 | 8 | 6 | 8 | 2 | 4 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiARo-Mql6U | 13,932 | tiARo-Mql6U | 2021-07-22 00:00:00 | this is jocko podcast number 291 with echo charles and me jaco willink good evening echo your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces but in less traditional roles men risking their lives not as combatants but as instructors or advisors or as symbols of our nation's commitments the fact that the united states is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered to cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the second world war men have fought and died in malaya greece the philippines algeria and cuba and cyprus and almost continuously on the indo-chinese peninsula no nuclear weapons have been fired no massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate this is another type of war new in its intensity ancient in its origin war by guerrillas subversives insurgents assassins were by ambush instead of by combat by infiltration instead of aggression seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him it is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what we to what has strangely been called wars of liberation to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved it preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts it requires in those situations where we must counter it and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the united states army another military dimension guerrilla warfare has necessarily been added to the american profession of arms the literal translation of guerrilla warfare a little war is hardly applicable to this ancient but at the same time modern threat i note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the current struggle wars of subversion covert aggression and in broad professional terms special warfare or unconventional warfare by whatever name this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics communications and logistics to meet this threat the mission of our armed forces and especially the army today is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to help those who have the will to help themselves pure military skill is not enough a full spectrum of military paramilitary and civil action must be blended to produce success the enemy uses economic and political warfare propaganda and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror by subversion and by force of arms to win in this struggle our officers and men must understand and combine and combine the political economic and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission the green beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence a badge of courage a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom i know the united states army will live up to its reputation for imagination resourcefulness and spirit as we meet this challenge signed john f kennedy so the green berets the u.s army special forces were formed for this new type of warfare well i guess as jfk said new in its intensity but ancient in its origin and today almost 60 years since jfk made these statements there's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare and we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences he served in us army special forces worked as a contractor for some government agencies and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company field craft survival his name is mike glover mike thanks for coming out man thanks for having me on it's an honor happy to be here green berets green berets the deal we're kind of a big deal i don't know if you knew that yeah you know um obviously uh the seal community gets quite a bit of um you know flak because we're like uh i guess for lack of a better word kind of popular right now yes but people seem to forget there was the green green beret movie way before and and then i was thinking about the actual delta force movie the other day which was way before anybody knew anything about the seal team so so anyways let's get to it man let's go back to the beginning let's go back to where how you grew up where you're from what turned you into you oh conception in korea actually conceived in korea conceived in korea my dad was a joe and an army kid what do you do so he had two mls's he was a 95 bravo which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy what years was he in 70 late 70s into the mid 80s okay his his stint was was he did he go to nam he didn't he was he gre he was in high school during vietnam and then by time he got out the war had been fought it was over but he got stationed in korea at some point yeah i got stationed in korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age she was 18 years old and then they had me at 19. um wait how old was he 25 24 and um just living his best life doing the army thing uh we actually moved to california to fort ord california where i was born in monterey it looks like a zombie apocalypse there now the actual base for looks like a sim shoot house did it get shut down it did they they shut down all the buildings condemned them but it's still open like you could drive through it publicly so there's no gates and um stationed in germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child and then um parents separated so got to come to daytona beach florida where i was basically raised going with who who'd you go with i went with dad um mom didn't speak any english uh met a guy in germany winded up getting back over to the us where um i i spent time between florida and north carolina splitting the difference growing up were you were you looking at the army like good deal were you around the army all the time when you're when you're a little bit older yeah it's like it's like us you know we live you know these civilian lives now but there's always this um evidence that we served in some capacity so i saw that evidence as a child my dad had you know the dog tags the pictures the military gear i remember playing with his ta-50 his old military gear his his mess kit and all of his uh lbe and all the old stuff that we had the webbing and i just kind of knew growing up in that environment that i was going to be in the military his brother was a career navy guy so i was you know growing up with charlie sheen and navy sills and um chuck norris and delta force and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age i mean man as as as young as i can remember that's all i wanted to do was do the military yeah that's the same with me i always say people like when did you make that decision i'm like i don't know because i just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid yeah that's what i remember well but you were in mostly growing up in daytona beach yeah daytona beach and then splitting the difference between uh north carolina my my mom actually settled right outside of fort bragg north carolina which i would spend a lot of time what year were you born 80. so you're growing up so now this is like the 90s yeah yeah it's weird i'm sitting here talking to you and for some reason in my mind i'm thinking i'm talking to like what like uh an older person yeah and i'm thinking in my mind like oh it was the 50s i don't know why i'm thinking that because jfk yeah i guess yeah i just read jfk so i'm thinking oh yeah this is the 50s and then i started thinking to myself wait a second this is like i was already in the navy when you're a freaking teenager or whatever so you're growing up in the 90s 90s what year did you go in the navy 1990 90 okay i was 10. yeah that was 10. wow wow now i feel young all of a sudden yeah yeah so so what are you doing in daytona beach what's the scene down there are you in the water are you surfing are you listening to music what are you listening to no i was i mean my dad jokes and and says that i was a part fish because i was always in the water i mean i remember training i wanted to be a navy seal when i first started thinking about the military my uncle was very pro navy obviously my dad was pro army and i remember jumping and diving in the pools and doing underwater udt challenges like tying knots you know there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what navy seals did it was udt it was charlie sheen and navy seals so i wanted to do that but i grew up in the water outdoor fishing i grew up on a boat i mean i think i was out we probably fish four days a week what was your dad's civilian job so he he immediately transferred from the military and worked for the department of corrections for the state of florida so he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military which transitioned his retirement benefits a whole bunch of cool stuff for him and that's all i remember him doing and then are you uh is he liv does he is there another like did he get remarried or something who's taking care of you when he's at work yeah i mean man if i could reflect on that time period i think i did a lot of taking care of myself but i was super independent i was an only child so it was just me you know so growing up um i had a good imagination it was very responsible as a kid i don't remember getting in trouble i wasn't into bars wasn't into weed all the typical things that kids are into i remember like doing con up i concept of the operation plans in breeze as a 10 year old i had a toy mp5 and planting ops getting guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low vis operations at night and then even a or i didn't even know what an aar was an after action review i would come back and like let's talk about it like weird stuff who's we like all my friends oh okay yeah yeah i was just that kid yeah i was that kid hey did you what about the the fact that your parents got divorced did you did you have like uh animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just did you just kind of because you know when when divorce happens at a young age sometimes kids can't understand it and it it makes them you know uh uh i guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other sounds like you were pretty maybe you kind of uh because you can also when you get older you go yeah you know what they just you know they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along they weren't quite a good fit and i get it and we're going to carry on yeah that was me man i just never had a i never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right i i don't know if it was because i was taught not to judge people and even my family in the circumstance i was in what i looked at it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to to go to different places meet different family members and then have these cool experiences i mean i grew up in north carolina with my cousins um running the streets doing playing war shooting bb guns and then i come back to florida then i was hanging out with my dad fishing outdoors on the beach in the water and so i i had a really good childhood i despite the problem that was separation which eventually at the age of 12 winded up moving back to my mom's taking advantage of opportunities there what was the what were the opportunities there so um when i went so my obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me you know and so i'm going back and forth getting spoiled and in separate ways but i remember actually on the summer of like when i was 12 or 13 my mom tried to convince me that hey you know your dad just met a new woman which she did which was going to be my stepmom she had three kids at the time and then it's an allocation of resources right when you have three new children in the home you don't get taken care of like you used to and so i was like yeah maybe i want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom and it's a good situation so i just said dad i'm just gonna live with my mom and he was i remember painfully he was bummed out i don't think i've ever heard my dad my dad cry or saw him cry and i think he was crying on the phone when i told him that and it created a divide because i was his only baby boy but um he had children to take care of he had a newborn with the woman that he was with and i knew he had this life yet this vertical he had to concentrate on so i lived with my mom and then you know in north carolina and uh and she wasn't she wasn't wealthy at all she was an entrepreneur small business beauty salon we were struggling i thought it was going to be like oh this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time my dad never buys me stuff and so i went into that opportunity and realized hey i mean me and my mom are gonna have to fend for ourselves was she with another guy at this point she was she was with my stepdad she eventually met my stepdad at 15. she had a boyfriend at the time named alex was a good dude from that she had met in germany had brought her over um but she was trying to find her way i mean i mean i don't even think and this is this is uh uh honest reflection i don't think i had shoes until i was like 14. like i had flip-flops it was like she didn't have a car until i was 15 um because she couldn't afford a car so we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur but that taught me more about life moving forward being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader i think a lot of those experiences come from that you know he said you said first of all it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached and able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid you also said hey uh i was taught not to judge people who taught you that i grew up as a baptist and um i wasn't like i'm not a super religious person i never have been but i've questioned i remember crying as a kid when i was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people like what happens when you die i remember i actually i remember this thought because it stuck with me i said to myself in my head i said wait a minute if if uh god's jesus is father then who's god's father and there's this void in my brain i'm like oh my god i can't figure this out and i remember being distraught and so religion kind of brought that together for me so i grew up like a christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way also my dad's a military-minded guy so discipline integrity honor all those things were instilled at me at a young age too and then what at what point did you because you were in the water all the time and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the navy and and try and go in the seal teams what made you make the decision to go in the army instead yeah good question i i never been asked that but specifically i know the exact moment um i was on my the steps of my grandma's house in daytona beach and my uncle who was still active navy had just come back from um being on the water and in the fleet and i was talking to him about being a navy seal and he said listen i know you're torn between the two do you want me a green beret do you want to be a navy seal and for a kid it's like it's a choice but you don't realize the the progress that you have to go through and so i'm like so what happens if i fail i said if i go to selection and all right go to buds if i fail what happens he goes you're mopping a deck forever he goes and then he told me about the whole recruit me he actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the navy and he said hey there's a whole bunch of guys i served with that didn't make it that fill all the slots in the navy that nobody else wants to do and i'm like so what happens if i'm in the army and then my dad was there to educate me says listen you could be an airborne ranger you pass ranger school you go to selection you don't make it you're still an airborne ranger combat arms and i'm like well i just want to be in the fight and i made the decision right there in that moment was like okay let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy when i was 10 years old i made a bet with my dad that i was going to be a green beret damn betterman bet him an mp5sd did he pay up no i had to buy it myself i had to buy myself he could buy me a phoenix arms 22 right now the uh the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when i i was freaking you know i was like i think i was 18 when i joined but i might have been 17 on the maps program anyways i was young but i was older than you were at age 10 yeah and i didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into my mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's 80 attrition rate in buds and it's totally uh it's it's the worst i mean look here here's what's the worst if you join the navy because you want to be a mechanic or you want to be an uh work on aviation equipment that's awesome the navy is freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue-collar jobs the navy is freaking awesome for that you you want to like i said you want to be a diesel mechanic bro go go join the navy you'll get awesome experience of that you want to learn about communication systems technical stuff the navy's great but the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things yes at all at least as far as i can tell so but that's what you're going to end up as and so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it it's not not going to be fun what's worse too you train up for that job before you get used to right you used to train up for that job yeah so then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks yeah so when you go into buzz that's your motivation i don't want to go back to that thing that vocational thing no it's it's great and the other thing that's that's really good about the army and the marine corps is you get all this fundamental basic infantry small unit training before you go to special operations training so in the in the seal teams you don't have that you don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small unit tactics like you have in the army and the marine corps so how old are you when you and lest 17 yeah i joined when i was 17. and go to boot camp got what you expected yeah i went to infantry boot camp when the sand hill became a 11 bravo i actually signed up to be a an airborne ranger an option 40 contract which is known as the the option to go to ranger battalion oh so that's that means you're going to a battalion yeah i was i was so i was set to go to battalion but what i signed up for as an mos was called 11 x-ray and 11 x-ray is similar to the 18 x-ray where the x stands for they fill the gap they decide what they want to make you so back in the day it's not like this now but back in the day there was four different specialties in the infantry 11 bravo charlie delta and mike and uh or not mike not delta but mike and hotel so if you are 11 bravo infantrymen if you're a charlie morterman if you're a mike mc heavyweight um mechanized vehicles if you're a hotel heavy armor like riding on humvees so basically an infantryman with different skill sets well when i got there the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing so they said hey you guys in a group you're going to be bravo's like literally standing literally where you're standing in your class rank or anything like that just where you're standing where you were lumped together and so they're like you lump you're going to be a bravo you know and they made the mosses well they made me an uh 11 hotel and so i'm like okay so i'm an infantry guy that drives and humvee shoots 50 cals and tow missiles cool let's do this at the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to ait where you get your advanced training um they they're supposed to have a rip brief a ranger indoctrination program brief so the rip instructor comes and i'm like what's going on here like he's not talking to us he's talking to the bravos and the charlie's like why isn't he talking to us don't even think anything about it because i'm like i'm a e1 i don't have a rank right and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey mike you're going to fort lewis washington to um an infantry unit and i'm like i i have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my mls and go no you're a hotel ranger battalion doesn't have hotels i'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels like you should have told us before you went to ait i'm like i'm a private i think i tried to say something but you guys ignored me so luckily for me my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th airborne corps big division of uh airborne infantry units so i call him during my little break and like this is what happened so he gets this you know long story short he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in and i'm in a room like similar to this and they're like i know your uncle i'm gonna hook you up like literally the guy says it to me is the e5 and he's the recruiter for the old guard the third infantry regiment right i don't even know what the hell the old guard is i'm like okay what do i got to do and a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders he says give me your orders and he looks at it and my mos says 11 hotel he literally takes a pin and scratches that 11 hotel writes 11 bravo and then signs his initials boom and it instant 11 bravo and i'm like oh and i'm like okay so am i going to battalion he goes well first we can't do that we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal when we send you the old guard because uh you're you could only be 11 bravo going the old guard we're gonna send you there and then you could put a 4187 everybody back in the day even kinda now says yeah 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do not true so i get the old guard no idea what the old guard is and long story short they're their ceremonial unit of the u.s military they do all the full honor funerals the state dignitary escorts all the stuff i did not want to do um i had to take advantage of my time this is pre g-wat so i'm like so we're talking what like uh 97 97 97. so i get there and i you know luckily for my um circumstance my uncle is very well known in these units he he served as a platoon sergeant does her storm uh he's just a popular character in the infantry in this in these particular units and the old guard for infantry guys is like a break yeah you go to korea you go to the 82nd and then you go to the old girl to take a break so i get there e1 don't know anything and i realize it's not the place that i want to be but i have to take advantage of my time so i head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces um that i could be and so that's that's where that journey began did any was anyone telling you what to do was anyone talking to you about it was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get ready for or anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcenko books the you know the the marine sniper all these books john plaster mack visage john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pool table haul while i was doing kp where i was cleaning crap up and because i was like i i want to digest this i was like hiding doing that stuff and so i had an understanding of what it took in in discipline but i had no idea because i didn't get any intel as i got into the infantry i i maximized my time i trained up for ranger school i went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class i went to airborne school how hard is it to get a billet to rangers goal as an 18 year old almost impossible so there's a there's tryouts most infantry units run what's called pre-arranger and and people think hey you raise your hand you get a slot that's not true for battalion it's a requirement so they get the majority of the slots if you're a regular infantry unit you get slots based on order of merit so they have an oml list and if you earn it they'll give you a slot and then you're on the list and then you just trickle your way to the top so i tried out for it about 30 of us tried out for us only three of us got slots and i was a young pfc what's the trial based on freaking pt test and weapons assembly or something well it's harder than ranger school so it's it's about a week right so in a week it's like how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed because these units have their reputation on the line if the third inventory regiment sends five dudes to raider school and nobody passes it reflects poorly on on the regiment so when i showed up um it was a rucksack it was a you know a ruck march 12 miles in time it was land navigation it was a common core task it was patrolling the number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness and around your school it's your ability to lead and so as a young 18 year old at the time i'm navigating this problem set it's like hey pfc glover give a warno give a con up and i'm like oh like i have to brief this so planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in ranger school so i was successful yeah and you're a pfc and there's 30 people try out and you get selected i got selected yeah i was one of one of three that got selected we went to ranger school i was actually the only one out of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare it was rare to have a ranger tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the um the thing that i had to overcome was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before ranger school fear i'm assuming fear of failure fear of failure absolutely and um you know you have no perspective you just have these stories you know my squad leader had been to ranger school before so he was feeding me information which almost makes it worse right like you gotta you gotta be aware of this and and you're trying to live with that solution in mind and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face i showed up and i'm super physically fit and i remember getting my um i had a low body fat high physical fitness score and when i got there i realized very quickly it wasn't about that it was a that's a the ranger assessment part of ranger school is relatively easy i mean it's we're talking eight minute mile pace five miles 40 minutes we're talking about basic push-up sit-ups and running and pull-ups and basic stuff really quickly you start deteriorating because you're not eating you're averaging about one mre a day when i went during winter time and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude i mean i went to raynor school as even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds yeah that's uh that's good times yeah that's another thing man i might have taken the gamble you know they're like hey listen jocko you might end up on a ship somewhere but if you go to ranger school guaranteed you're not eating i'd have been like hmm let me think about that one yeah roll the dice yeah that's another ball game that's the thing about buds the thing about buds you're getting fed man yeah and it's all you can eat that's huge it's beautiful they just want you jacked that's huge but the thing is ranger school like you said ranger school is really the premier leadership school for the army it is yeah absolutely you're running operations you're um you're you're filling a different role basically every operation sometimes you're the leader sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner yep yeah yeah it's uh you know when i went to raider school as a very young kid um i didn't know what to expect and then it's sink or swim you either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be look there's the characteristics of being successful in range school aren't that difficult but being a clear concise decisive leader um under stress is super important and i so and and for for com you know comparably to all my peers which weren't peers i'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated i obc infantry officer basic course navy seals green berets like these are guys that i highly respect so it was a whole plethora like a melting pot of a whole bunch of different backgrounds and i realized when you took away food when you took away sleep when you broke everybody down we were on this equal plane and so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult and so i saw people uh sink and i saw people succeed because they swam those people that sunk were just they couldn't make decisions and then when they got stressed which they'd never been tested in stress they couldn't do basic basic skill sets right so ranger school they give you the formula and here's the con up here's the five paragraph op order here's how you execute a rate just follow that step by step and you'll be successful and i realized how analytic that was and so i just needed to get through and check the block and get it done and i saw a lot of people um sink that i highly respected because they started falling apart i mean i saw guys who were beef um beefy dudes were jacked who were strong and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food and when when i saw that as a young man as a young leader it changed my entire perspective on life like it re-prioritized the hierarchy of things that i thought were important and i'm like that's not important like i had like eating eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys so i came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a i was an informal leader i wasn't even a designated leader and that shaped me to become the leader that i would become when you say people that would have trouble with people that were having a hard time making a decision like what would they be having a hard time making a decision like hey there's uh where are we going to put this overwatch position or where are we going to set up the the base element like those kind of decisions yeah everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change rapidly so in ranger school you get a set mission which is based off your con up that you plan it's a deliberate mission set contingency-based mission set you go in the field with that and then after that it's all fragos it's fragmentation orders of the mission's changing we're doing this and mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change hey guys this just happened now you have to dab what are you going to do i have no idea it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain it was a lack of sleep i mean i had guys that broke down and like just quit because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally what's going to get you through that and typically it's grit it's resolved it's it's digging deep and some of those guys never found that and even though they they were tested and they had an opportunity they never found it so when we came out of the field the greatest thing about rainer school is you're judged by your peers you you write down on a piece of paper right at the v like the second you come out of the field you're smoked out of your mind they put you in a classroom they sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind and that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers that's i mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man adapt change do some self reflection or fail and just be that guy for the rest of your life that that right there set the precedence for everything moving forward and in ranger school one of the ways that you could drop this by getting peered out right where they you get if you get ranked the lowest guy x number of times then the instructors are like yeah this guy is not the guy that we want if you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field you'll immediately get recycled so a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase it's potentially going back to the beginning of rainer school so now you're talking about when i was doing school 70 plus days it was a couple months three different phases when i went darby which is in the uh fort benning and sand hill dahlonega which is in the mountains and then at eglin which is in the swamps so if you get recycled you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning i mean i i uh i interviewed a woman lisa jaster who was one of the first females to go through rainer school she failed every phase she got to the last phase and failed and they said you failed so here's your options you could knock down like it was a weird thing like knock out these push-ups because we gotta assess if you're physically a fit to go ahead and go forward if you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now you're done but we're gonna recycle you to the very beginning so she was in right school for like a year like sustained combat operations and sleep in food deprived for like a year and i can't imagine but that was your options it's either again it's either sink or swim you have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself which i think is the most impactful that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get [ __ ] camped when are they helping people out by let's say you get graded low is an instructor going to come over to you and say like hey listen here's what's going on you're really indecisive you need to start thinking through these things the reason i'm asking you this is because like in basic seal training first of all you're not doing anything really tactical but second of all there's no real hey bro here's the mistake that you're making whereas the kind of training that i ran which was which is like the advanced training like the the the training that we do with platoons before the deployment right i mean that's all i'm doing is being like hey man you can't be you can't be sitting there uh being indecisive you need to figure out which what call you're gonna make you need to at least give your guys some direction like i'm constantly doing that to these guys is that happening at ranger school or is it more like yeah you know what you this guy ain't got it yeah they i mean here the reality is they know if you're not gonna make it the your peers know the students know there's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war and one of the things that i think is important about the the ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tap now now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms but when you saw that tab you understood that that guy was capable as a leader in combat and it told a lot so a lot of the times especially with the officers who come out of iobc they're brand new 22 year old second lieutenants don't give them the opportunity and they'll say hey these are the fixes fix this if you don't fix it you're going to fail you go to you report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab forget about it your career field for the you're just now you might as well just get out for for young joes like pfcs that i was for specialists or even young ncos not commissioned officers you have an opportunity they'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you um take that opportunity you might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols which just means they're going to recycle and you'll get another chance uh a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again what's the attrition rate at ranger school it's pretty high it's about 80 really yeah it's about 80 so you get you get done with it and now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation what are you are you 19 yet i'm 19. 19. you graduated from that um so what's next so um my uncle when i'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier he was there as a guard he was a platoon sergeant um before my time and when i'm there i put a 4187 go to range of time it doesn't get accepted they're like no i have a ranger tab which i thought was a prerequisite to get a 41.7 they're like no uh we don't we don't need the numbers and in 98 they didn't need the numbers 99. and so i i talked to my uncle i'm like what do you want what are my options here like i'm ready to be in the fight which there wasn't a fight and that's probably the reason why i didn't get 4187 approved they're like um he's like go go try out for the tomb and at the time um and still at that unit the tomb of the unknown soldier was the most difficult it's probably the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life to be honest selections in special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was i went there the army's been guarding the tomb of the unknowns since the the 50s it's been around um since the uh internment of the world war one unknown and it was an honor it was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces and so i took the opportunity i went and tried out how long is the tryout so you typically do a two week try out it's called tdy they just they tdy you to the tomb you do a whole bunch of assessments and then they go you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try and that's a seven and a nine month process uh if you're smart seven months if you're not so smart nine months so it took me like ten months so it took me a long time to get my earn my team identification badge but the the the process is almost a year and then what's that job entail i mean obviously we know what it looks like from the outside yeah guarding the tomb but what's it look like from the inside it's a suck fest man it's a suck fest i mean it's it's the most difficult thing i've done um but the most honorable uh responsibility i've been given in the military so the tomb of the unknown soldiers have been guarded by the army since the the 40s and they guard the tune 24 hours a day seven days a week and that rotation takes place in three release based on height first being the tallest second being the mid mid guys and third being the shortest minimum six feet tall and then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on day off day on day off day on and four days off all year round you know your schedule for three years in advance and you typically guard if you're a guard you have your badge during the summer time seven walks a day 30-minute walks with a seven-minute guard change and then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night at night we don't do it in ceremony uniform it's typically class i think bees at the time or bdus and it's a roving patrol your your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect and we we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather it's just being done what makes the uh what makes it so challenging to get through the is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here in your hairs and stuff like that yeah it's it's the attention to detail line six of the signals creed states my standard will remain perfection and so you build this culture around paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform even your life even your personal life of being squared away so i i did that job and um you know painful to be a new guy doing that job but inspections of your uniform every single day if not by the hour they have a culture where you earn a walk you don't just get a walk you have to earn that walk so you have to earn it by understanding knowledge you have to verb beta memorize 28 pages of knowledge about the tomb of the unknown soldier and the history of arlington national cemetery because you're representative you're like you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3 000 people come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the us military so it's a it's a diplomatic position not just a a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth and so i remember the my first walk was in front of 3 000 people at 12 o'clock noon cnn fox news cameras were in my face i remember hearing standing up for arms hearing the bayonet rattle on my weapon because you were freaking nervous because i was nervous i was standing in front i mean i'm looking through aviator glasses out of my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect and it's intimidating but it's a sharp learning curve and again it's a huge opportunity for me so the training program or the selection program that you're talking about that's 10 months long are you working during that time are you doing any guarding or no you're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you early morning late afternoon and everything at night i even did what's called a vigil because i wanted to get the hell away from the guys i didn't want to get hazed and abused i did vigils where i would work all day and so i'm you know helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning late afternoon walks and then at night i'm taking when the cemetery closes at seven pm until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding just to get away from the guys i was like breaking records of doing [ __ ] i was like doing 21 vigils back-to-back so what the hell is going on with the guys that was so bad was it just freaking all all in your [ __ ] all day long well the so the the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge in the u.s military besides the astronauts badge because you know they're not a dime a dozen military so the tim guard badge is is very much protected by the tim guard badge protectors and so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there they want the right guys and they they want to make sure you earn it and i did and back then you know hazing um we come from the military where hazing was normal i mean if you weren't hazed you didn't feel like you were loved like i got my eib my airborne wings my halo wings punched into my chest my every rank punched in my collarbone into the bone um and that was just the the universe we uh evolved in that was very much the case everything from running through the cemetery trying to find you know inscriptions of of specific people getting smoked to death low crawling across you know face down in the lawn getting you know getting smoked um just routine hazing to make sure hey this is a we're testing to evaluate you constantly if you want to be here and it's something that i guess is handed down in tradition what's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge not not that big of a deal i mean it's pretty i i just saw a picture of it i have a small 4x6 picture of it and um the third relief or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in o6 and he pins your badge on you in the morning and typically you work the whole night take your you take your batch test which is a a series of specific tests including changing the guard at noon reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge with no errors being perfect and a written test all kinds of stuff and then you get your badge pinned and you know i'm badge four 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today then how long did you have that job for that long i did it for about a year and a half afterwards and then so for a year and a half after you went through nine months of this [ __ ] yeah they're like okay and this is what you're doing that's your job that's your job and how did you like it so i love the honor and the duty um but it's not what i wanted to do in the military and i i you know one thing we had to do is maintain our um common core skill sets so we would come around the field and those three days down we do med training we do raids patrolling we had to maintain all these things so you get the infantry experience as a part-time position representing the army in a full-time position and it's not what i signed up for i mean i was trying to be the best that i could be be all you could be was the motto back then but it's not what i signed up for and then uh 911 changed uh everything for me in that in that situation but how but where were you stationed when 911 went down so i was so i got out of the army on my first uh rotation of four years september 3rd of 01 was my ets date get on army date i transitioned into the national guard because i was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry what was your plan like federal bureau of investigation hrt i was like if there's no war if i can't get into battalion i'm gonna get my college degree and i'm gonna go i'm gonna be a sniper in hrt um and that was my my sights were set on that and when 9 11 happened it was a week after my ets and how old are you now 21. so you're 21 years old you get out on september 3rd september 3rd is when i left the army okay yeah so then what do you do so september 11th comes now you're freaking you gotta be going berserk i'm freaking out like when september 11th happened i was in the national guard and i knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized and i'm like i'm not going to worthy no offense to the national guard but i'm like i'm not going to war with these dudes i immediate like i took i was at college in the cafeteria in fayetteville near fort bragg north carolina when this happened i went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff because i'm like we're going to war this is it and immediately i started making phone calls and they're like you ain't doing nothing man nothing's going on with us right now stand by to stand by and i'm like i have to make moves so i started reaching out to recruiters and uh very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection went straight to green braces was it hard to get to go straight to selection there must have been lines out the door at that point impossible i was a i was a 20 year old e5 i mean i made sergeant at 20 years old airborne ranger qualified with a tomb guard badge and when i showed up to recruiter he looked at me like i was a 16 year old kid who wanted to play army and i was like is this not a thing and at that time they hadn't even worked out this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve i'm like dude i just got out last week and he's like sorry man you got to start over and so i'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers um trying to get back in the army wait oh cause you had to go back through like the recruiting process very beginning i mean i'd have to go to basic ait i had a ranger tab so i didn't have to do any of that stuff but i had to go back through the army and processing system called 30th ag from the beginning i'm duck walking and i actually went to the recruiting uh station uh which is called maps is where they unprocess you in military uniform and i remember they brought us in the room and like everybody stripped down and guys are looking at me in i'm battle dressed uniform stripping down and they're like what is this dude doing like isn't he a recruiter like what is happening and i'm you know in my boxer briefs like everybody else duck walking doing all my little drills to get back in the army and then you go straight to selection from there so i went through a program basically an 18 x-ray program and i had to try out where it's basically special operations preparation course they evaluate like they did at media ranger school and said hey is this kid um is there a probability that he's going to be successful let's evaluate him and land nav let's rock him let's pt him and his and if he's good we'll give him a slot so that's that's prep you just said prep it's the it's basically uh the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail they're setting you up for success and so i quickly evaluated and they're like hey this dude's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um when i went to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the army so you're talking about experience typically ncos not commissioned officers or junior enlisted guys who have experience in the military and you show up it's a week of assessment land nav all these gates to make sure that you're good to go and then it's team week it's it's basically a little mini version of hell week and then they do the long range the long-range movement is what gets everybody it's the land navigation leading into a long-range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land nav lan f yeah it's our trigger it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and uh just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just this is crazy i mean it's to me it's like walking is very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a rock on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this [ __ ] yeah where your body starts to warm up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i never had a hard time with wrecking my feet were hard my my back was good so i didn't have a difficult time with with selection but um what i saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement and it just broke them down what are you doing today in those in that selection where you did what a week of rocking what do you think you're doing today uh on average six ten to ten kilometers per movement per gate um so you know it it depends like you start that whole entire process here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet and then we'll give you an 18 miler to 20 i think the the average is a 20 something plus miler and so you're broke when you start and then we'll move you for a long period of time and see it's all a test on preparation by the way it's it has nothing to do with the actual assessment it has everything to measure whether or not you prepared in advance and so what they want is the guys who prepared in advance and so at at one point uh for the long-range movement which is 30 probably 30 plus miles uh over a period of 24-48 hours you're non-stop moving and if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately you just fail and so you have to meet these gates but it's all it's all on your own and that that jacks up people's minds when somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you gotta be what uniform you got to be in and what time you're moving that independence and setting off with no destination of mine hey students i want you to get ready get your rook on you're going to move until you we tell you to stop that immediately destroys people's uh mindset out the gate because they're like what do you mean so they go out the gate they start spreading and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out or they're so insecure with the circumstance they impose they self-induce all the stress and then they quit and you're like you're self-selecting because you don't have the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing that's how war is i mean war is hey we might be flexing all night we might be flexing all year who knows and that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down and they ring out or whatever what do they do how do you quit in selection so uh in selection um in periods of time you go back to your barracks and when i went to selection it was a piece of plywood no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad nothing nothing comfortable you'll go you go to sleep in the morning and you wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone and you're like what and so what people are doing is getting up they're leaving knocking on the hut and this self-selecting like literally saying i'm done i'm i'm out you have to voluntarily withdraw in order and have the conversation in order to check on a selection yeah there's something i've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically there's two things that come to mind and i've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective just at my own personal um mindset is i'm very aware of time i'm very aware of time i can always feel time creeping up on me i can always feel time like people think oh we'll be able to make it we can we can rest a little longer and i always had that sense that oh actually no it's not we're not going to make it in fact we need to leave now if we're going to make it or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan i say you know what we need to start moving forward we can't spend any more time planning it's time to go i always had that sense of of time and i still do and it's it's almost a level of paranoia it's something that always is in the front of my um uh heads up display right my head's up display is always going hey wait check your time check your time check your time but that reminds me of being out on patrols where there are total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a [ __ ] ton of weight and you're going really far and you still gotta get to the target on time and and the the the intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five six seven hour patrol they won't get up unless you're like hey boys we gotta go and if you if you don't do that if somebody doesn't do that somebody doesn't say hey guys it's time to get up and go there's no there will be no movement what will happen they'll they'll not hit that target they'll be like hey we couldn't make the target that's what will happen people accept that like yeah you know what yeah and and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go you know what we we said 10 minute break it's been nine minutes hey boys get ready to roll that's a big deal yes that's a big deal yeah i think part of the you know like you say discipline is freedom part of that freedom is control that you have self-control if you understand what you have to do to be disciplined to make gates to meet time hacks then you have control you're offensive you're thinking proactively and a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that it's it's it's uh real crazy to see that something so simple a task so common core can uh weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with the combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not yeah and like you just said what it really boils down to is when you're tired when you're sore and when you don't know how much longer this is gonna last do you have what it takes to put your rock back on stand up and start walking again that's it yeah yeah you wouldn't think it's something that freaking simple so simple so primal too so you get through selection and then you hit the q course hit the q course as a 18 bravo special forces weapons guy um going to third special forces group any any um highlights out of the q course no i think you know uh in in the lead in talking about jfk and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare i learned that truly from the long duration that i was in the queue course i went to robin sage merely weeks after robin sage after that experience i was living that training in afghanistan in a remote fire base so robin sage which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is rockingham north carolina the the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing this elaborate uh scenario was so impactful for me i mean it's crazy yeah so just to give a little background on this so the the the mission of the green berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces get them trained up get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and you have to get information from them and set up targets and the whole nine yards because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that yeah it's by with through it's foreign internal defense it's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now but it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces you just can't go and do deliberate actions only you know sr d a hr those things are complementary to a strategic plan the strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds so when i went to robin sage you had west pointers like junior west pointers we had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind you have to break bread with them you have to drink tea with them you have to learn about their family and build this relationship because you have to trust these guys on target and so that's what i really took away from robin sage was this opportunity to learn and grow in culture and then build that relationship which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side in the width portion of it and finally fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with that that's super important because the the translation of going into um into war was exactly that with the circumstance with afghanistan at the time and you know like i one of the scenarios i built conduit and a chicken coop in a chicken house for six hours with this guy and i'm like i'm like looking at the other dude i'm with him like dude what's going on like what are we doing right now are we just are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's we got tasks to do this and then at the end of that six hours we heard a noise and i'm like it's all coming together we put our m4 we ran in the woods put our m4s together out of our backpack and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer and i'm like this is so awesome i mean it's still long it's a long burn but it was so awesome as an experience and then you you so you get done with anything else in cue course stands out not survival school i mean survival school got my ass handed to me i mean it's the first time that i um i mean how long is this survival school it's pretty long i mean it's probably a few weeks when i went through it was like a escape like a survival block yeah it's uh sears c the high res c uh c version what you guys have gone through and then you know you escape you evade and then you go into the rtl and just get your ass handed to you and and again you learn very rapidly uh that we're not all created equal in our capacity to deal with stress and i dealt fine with it i mean i i grew up fighting i grew up in martial arts i grew up doing all these things which set me up for success there to go hey man this is an exercise learn from this experience wait what martial arts did you grow up in ninjutsu before straight up who wants something dude i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you doing why are you only having him stand there it's like it's an assessment and i stared at myself for an hour in meditation i'm like what the hell i learned a lot about myself in that hour it's crazy all right so uh back to back to did you did wait before we go there did you guys fight each other in school a lot it was aggressive a lot of dudes got hurt it was just i think it was a lot before what years was this uh 93-94 ufc just coming out yeah people were this is what during the revolution oh yeah oh yeah it was a lot of i mean there were i mean ninjutsu has uh in in this japanese form has a lot of traditional uh jiu-jitsu type moves on the ground but it's not ground game that's the problem that is the problem that's an inherent problem with with that and so i i i learned a lot about discipline from that experience but it made me harder so when i went to survival school i was j | i my first instructors were all green berets at fort bragg north carolina who opened in ninjutsu school active and former sf guys and it was gangster we were doing stuff like my mom once wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy i was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking oh black belt magazine i had the catalog it was it was i had all the red knives all the it was crazy it was a it was a cool experience because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets and so they like you do like a lot of guys with our experiences do try to impart those experiences and impact on young people and so they're doing the same with me so i felt like i was mentored by these green berets once i went into a class and my mom dropped me off and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal she dropped me off and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror and she came back an hour and ten minutes later and i was still standing in front of the mirror and she was pissed off because she's like am i i'm paying for my son why are you | 8 | 6 | 4 | wait did you have them shoes with the toe cut out oh yeah oh look at you you're like sure i had all the freaking yeah you were just getting it it was crazy | am i i'm paying for my son why are you | 8,6,5 | -6,8,-3 | 8 | 6 | 5 | -6 | 8 | -3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
those electrolytes and maintain mental clarity
and energy throughout the day. LMNT contains a science
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you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
two all-American swimmers from Stanford. And everything about ROKA
eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
the biology, the visual system, and I can tell you that
your visual system has to contend with an enormous
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to a shady area and back again, whether or not
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that's R-O-K-A-- .com and enter the code Huberman
to save 20% off on your first order. Again, that's roka-- R-O-K-A--
.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
understand your body and help you reach
your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
and long-term health can only be analyzed with
a quality blood test. One of the major issues
with a lot of blood and DNA tests out there, however, is
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try InsideTracker, you can go to
insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | the library of those supplements is constantly expanding. Again, that's livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist, I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition, a number of areas. We also got a lot of questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said, it's been something we've been talking about for a long time. So I was glad we were able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now, it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions and I think | 6 | 4 | 2 | the library of those supplements is constantly expanding. Again, that's livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist, I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition, a number of areas. We also got a lot of questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward to talking with you today. | Yeah, I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said, it's been something we've been talking about for a long time. So I was glad we were able to make it happen. | 8,5,6 | 6,4,5 | 8 | 5 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
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you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
two all-American swimmers from Stanford. And everything about ROKA
eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
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your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
and long-term health can only be analyzed with
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try InsideTracker, you can go to
insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | it's wonderful. And other studies have come out since then. So hopefully, our conversation will serve as a message of how science and actionable science can be perceived and that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into it, we get into it. It won't get physical because we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like to start with something that's rather basic and yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy balance and energy utilization. I think most people have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most people don't actually know what that is in terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you could just explain for people what happens when we eat food, of any kind, and how is that actually converted into energy, as a way of framing up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's a great question. And like you said, this is one of those things where people use the term calories in, calories out, and they say, well, that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's actually very complicated. So let's deal with what you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to a unit of energy, of heat specifically. | 8 | 4 | 6 | it's wonderful. And other studies have come out since then. So hopefully, our conversation will serve as a message of how science and actionable science can be perceived and that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into it, we get into it. It won't get physical because we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like to start with something that's rather basic and yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy balance and energy utilization. I think most people have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most people don't actually know what that is in terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you could just explain for people what happens when we eat food, of any kind, and how is that actually converted into energy, as a way of framing up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight gain, and body composition. | So it's a great question. And like you said, this is one of those things where people use the term calories in, calories out, and they say, well, that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's actually very complicated. So let's deal with what you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to a unit of energy, of heat specifically. | 8,4,6 | 6,2,8 | 8 | 4 | 6 | 6 | 2 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
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me discuss before on this podcast, every
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cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
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to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
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and sunglasses that are of the absolute
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
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your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
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InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | realize that the energy inside of the equation is more difficult to track than people think. So one, food labels, which we like to think as being from upon high, can have up to a 20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100 calories per serving, it could-- what's actually in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's what's called your energy, but then there's also metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract the energy from it-- and typically, this is because insoluble fiber from plant material, the carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the metabolizable energy in there. And there's some evidence that based on people's individual gut microbiome, that some people may actually be better at extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the things people will say is, well, see that's why you shouldn't worry | 2 | 4 | 6 | realize that the energy inside of the equation is more difficult to track than people think. So one, food labels, which we like to think as being from upon high, can have up to a 20% error in them. | Really? So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100 calories per serving, it could-- what's actually in there could be 80 or 120. | 2,-1,6 | 4,6,5 | 2 | -1 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
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electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
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cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
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drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
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livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called AG1,
is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your
foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking Athletic
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taking Athletic Greens, and the reason I still
take athletic Greens, once or usually twice a day, is
that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very
important, it's populated by gut microbiota
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supply of vitamin D3, K2. Again, that's
athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | about tracking calories, because the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well, don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use financial examples. We know that to save money, you have to earn more money than you spend. Well, you can't exactly know how much money you're earning at a time because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea of what it's going to be. And you make certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look at the energy outside of the equation, which is actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is a few different buckets. The first one and the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people, is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily energy expenditure. Now, people use the term metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably, but they're not the same thing. So your total daily energy expenditure is the summation of all the energy you expend in a day. | 2 | 4 | 6 | No relevant dialogue found. | Yeah. That's a good example. | 3,2,5 | 8,1,4 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 8 | 1 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
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cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
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to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
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eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
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your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
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insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic rate is lower, but because they're expending a greater percentage of their calories from physical activity. Then you have something called the thermic effect of food, which is a relatively small percentage of your total daily energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to measure and usually what researchers do when they're looking at this stuff is they just make an assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to the amount of energy it takes to extract the energy out of food. So think about your body like a car. You don't just have gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery so you put in energy so you can get the energy out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you can't just eat food and then it just appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to | 2 | 4 | 6 | Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- | Fidgeting. Right. So resting metabolic rate is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic rate is lower, but because they're expending a greater percentage of their calories from physical activity. Then you have something called the thermic effect of food, which is a relatively small percentage of your total daily energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to measure and usually what researchers do when they're looking at this stuff is they just make an assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to the amount of energy it takes to extract the energy out of food. So think about your body like a car. You don't just have gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery so you put in energy so you can get the energy out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you can't just eat food and then it just appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to | 2,4,6 | 4,5,8 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
those electrolytes and maintain mental clarity
and energy throughout the day. LMNT contains a science
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of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60
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you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
two all-American swimmers from Stanford. And everything about ROKA
eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
the biology, the visual system, and I can tell you that
your visual system has to contend with an enormous
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to a shady area and back again, whether or not
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to save 20% off on your first order. Again, that's roka-- R-O-K-A--
.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
understand your body and help you reach
your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
and long-term health can only be analyzed with
a quality blood test. One of the major issues
with a lot of blood and DNA tests out there, however, is
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try InsideTracker, you can go to
insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | be systematically broken down and put into forms that can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times, people will say something like, well, not all calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat 100 calories from fat, your net will be about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the process of breaking down that fat, essentially, subtracts some of the calories away because you used it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example, some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest thing to convert into energy. Then you have carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100 calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still | 2 | 4 | 6 | be systematically broken down and put into forms that can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times, people will say something like, well, not all calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat 100 calories from fat, your net will be about 97 to 100. | So the process of breaking down that fat, essentially, subtracts some of the calories away because you used it in creating energy-- | 2,1,6 | 4,2,5 | 2 | 1 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
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to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
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eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
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your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
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InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
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podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | phenotype, people think they have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they overeat, they just spontaneously increase their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say, well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example, when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to tap my foot more, well, now if I'm consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll have to go check and we'll measure your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old papers on this, old being, I guess, back to the mid '90s, is that | 2 | 4 | 6 | phenotype, people think they have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they overeat, they just spontaneously increase their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say, well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example, when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to tap my foot more, well, now if I'm consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do two things at once. | Right. Can I quickly ask, was the person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly strong individual. Yeah. And I can't remember whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll have to go check and we'll measure your fidgeting. | 4,2,6 | 7,5,8 | 4 | 2 | 6 | 7 | 5 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
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cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
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drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
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mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
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you five free travel packs that make it
really easy to mix up Athletic Greens while you're
on the road, in the car, on the plane, et cetera. And they'll give you a year's
supply of vitamin D3, K2. Again, that's
athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | the calorie burn from NEAT is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100 calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about, in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't butcher the study because I'm trying to pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe they had people overeat. And I think it was by like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is the metabolic ward. So this is very tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting is, of course, on average, people gained weight and gained fat mass. But some people gained more than expected, and there was one person, in particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think | 2 | 4 | 6 | the calorie burn from NEAT is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100 calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about, in some cases, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. | Yeah. So there was actually a really classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't butcher the study because I'm trying to pull it out of my brain. | 8,6,5 | 4,3,6 | 8 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
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or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
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drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
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InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
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livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to be a little bit-- kind of in the transition phases. So if you start a diet within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any further reduction is mostly from the amount of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for example, finish a diet and move your calories to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR starts to come back up. There is still a small reduction, but I used to be somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic adaptation was a big reason why people stopped losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it can't be conscious because that will distract us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came out of University of Houston recently having people do, now, this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically, a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with one foot not weighted. And then they looked at it a bunch of things about glucose metabolism and glucose clearance and | 2 | 4 | 6 | does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to be a little bit-- kind of in the transition phases. So if you start a diet within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any further reduction is mostly from the amount of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for example, finish a diet and move your calories to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR starts to come back up. There is still a small reduction, but I used to be somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic adaptation was a big reason why people stopped losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's much more to do with NEAT. | Interesting. And you said that it can't be conscious because that will distract us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came out of University of Houston recently having people do, now, this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically, a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with one foot not weighted. And then they looked at it a bunch of things about glucose metabolism and glucose clearance and | 2,1,6 | 4,3,5 | 2 | 1 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
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you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
two all-American swimmers from Stanford. And everything about ROKA
eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
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your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
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a quality blood test. One of the major issues
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insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | insulin levels. And they didn't conclude that people burned a ton of calories, but what they concluded was that blood sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was a lot of excitement about this at some level, but based on everything you're telling me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere in between with-- in between, excuse me, sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well, what I'll tell people is if you're worried about NEAT, one thing you can do, like these watches, for example where people are like, oh, well, told me I burned these many calories. They are not accurate for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say, between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like depending on the brand, it could be more or less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you burn from exercise. So this is actually a great example where people go, well, calories in, calories out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I | 2 | 4 | 6 | And I think, there was a lot of excitement about this at some level, but based on everything you're telling me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. | Well, what I'll tell people is if you're worried about NEAT, one thing you can do, like these watches, for example where people are like, oh, well, told me I burned these many calories. They are not accurate for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say, between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy expenditure by these watches. | 6,4,5 | 2,-3,8 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 2 | -3 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
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to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
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eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
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your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
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and long-term health can only be analyzed with
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InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | talk to them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an online calculator, put in their information, it spat out some calories to eat, and they ate that and didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws of conservation of energy or that you might have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people like, if you're going to make an intentional weight loss a goal, and again, this can be different for different people, but typically, I tell people, weigh in, first thing in the morning or after you go to the bathroom, do it every day, and take the average of that for the week. And then compare that to the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question about that when you say, go to the bathroom not to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up, use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and then get on the scale, take that measurement, average that across the week, and then maybe | 2 | 4 | 6 | talk to them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an online calculator, put in their information, it spat out some calories to eat, and they ate that and didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws of conservation of energy or that you might have not gotten the right number for you? | The measurement tool was off. | 2,-1,6 | 0,-2,8 | 2 | -1 | 6 | 0 | -2 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
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to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
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eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
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your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
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InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
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podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
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packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | every Monday, you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly, I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before, where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in one day where you've just whatever reason holding some more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the reasons, and actually, believe it or not, weight fluctuations are actually identified as a major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one of the reasons early on that low carb diets tend to work really well is because people lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to that in a little bit because I have theories as to how that-- when | 2 | 4 | 6 | every Monday, you take that value and see how it progresses. | All right. And the reason I recommend doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly, I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before, where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in one day where you've just whatever reason holding some more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the reasons, and actually, believe it or not, weight fluctuations are actually identified as a major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- | 0,0,5 | 2,-1,8 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 2 | -1 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
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constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | people eat less carbohydrate, they excrete more water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can do some other things. It might make people literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it has some negative effects. I do have one quick question, and I do want-- we will return to NEAT in a moment. But when you say, the caloric burn as a consequence of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric burn during that exercise? So for instance, if somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK, they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think this is a month where a number of prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call it "Sober October," but in addition to avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how many calories they burned. My understanding is that if that particular form of exercise is a muscle building form of exercise, that at some point later, there might be an increase in muscle if you did everything right, do everything right, and then you will burn more energy as a consequence of adding that tissue. | 2 | 6 | 4 | people eat less carbohydrate, they excrete more water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. | And the fluid loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can do some other things. It might make people literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it has some negative effects. | 8,6,4 | 4,3,2 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
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you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
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eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
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your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
and long-term health can only be analyzed with
a quality blood test. One of the major issues
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try InsideTracker, you can go to
insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | That's a long process as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the right language in here. So if I were to go out, for instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate will have increased. Is that true, and is it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer both of those questions. Yes, there does seem to be a small increase in metabolic rate, and no, it does not appear to be enough to actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is where I tell people-- I think I have a good perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great because you could do something over here and he could tell you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN: This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome | 2 | 4 | 6 | That's a long process as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the right language in here. So if I were to go out, for instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate will have increased. Is that true, and is it significant enough to care about? | So answer both of those questions. Yes, there does seem to be a small increase in metabolic rate, and no, it does not appear to be enough to make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is where I tell people-- I think I have a good perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great because you could do something over here and he could tell you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. | 2,-1,5 | 6,3,8 | 2 | -1 | 5 | 6 | 3 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
those electrolytes and maintain mental clarity
and energy throughout the day. LMNT contains a science
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of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60
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you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
two all-American swimmers from Stanford. And everything about ROKA
eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
the biology, the visual system, and I can tell you that
your visual system has to contend with an enormous
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to a shady area and back again, whether or not
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that's R-O-K-A-- .com and enter the code Huberman
to save 20% off on your first order. Again, that's roka-- R-O-K-A--
.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
understand your body and help you reach
your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
and long-term health can only be analyzed with
a quality blood test. One of the major issues
with a lot of blood and DNA tests out there, however, is
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try InsideTracker, you can go to
insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | going to be, right? So this is actually one of the things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be very much, well, I think high intensity interval training is probably better because you get this post-exercise energy burn which they do see in some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm looking like, that's the example of a mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could be, you might have an increase and then you might actually have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual, but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight | 2 | 4 | 6 | going to be, right? So this is actually one of the things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be very much, well, I think high intensity interval training is probably better because you get this post-exercise energy burn which they do see in some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm looking like, that's the example of a mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could be, you might have an increase and then you might actually have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? | I see. And I have to imagine some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual, but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight | 2,3,5 | 4,5,6 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
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electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
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cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
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to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
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in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
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InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
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podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train, about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously, calories in, calories out dictates that that will play an important role as to whether or not I gain or lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not that form of exercise actually increases lean muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken exercise and split it into a number of different dimensions, but this is what you are so masterful at is really parsing how the different components work individually and together. So if you would just expand on that, I'd love to know what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a really fascinating thing. So first thing, I want to just go back to talking about like, for example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500 calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will | 2 | 4 | 6 | So is it safe to say that the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not that form of exercise actually increases lean muscle mass or not. | Yeah. So this is actually a really fascinating thing. So first thing, I want to just go back to talking about like, for example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500 calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will... | 3,4,6 | 8,5,8 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 5 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
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cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
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constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called AG1,
is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your
foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking Athletic
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taking Athletic Greens, and the reason I still
take athletic Greens, once or usually twice a day, is
that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very
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supply of vitamin D3, K2. Again, that's
athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | still take athletic Greens, once or usually twice a day, is that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important, it's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and Athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, Athletic Greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins, and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational or nutritional needs are met. And it tastes great. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com.huberman, and they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up Athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, et cetera. And they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000 calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do 1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what the exact number is, but I can be relatively confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms of comparison, it might be OK, like within subject. | 6 | 2 | 4 | still take athletic Greens, once or usually twice a day, is that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important, it's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and Athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, Athletic Greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins, and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational or nutritional needs are met. And it tastes great. | But I will say about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000 calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do 1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what the exact number is, but I can be relatively confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms of comparison, it might be OK, like within subject. | 8,2,8 | 4,-1,5 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 4 | -1 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
those electrolytes and maintain mental clarity
and energy throughout the day. LMNT contains a science
back to electrolyte ratio of 1,000 milligrams
of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60
milligrams of magnesium. If you'd like to try an LMNT,
you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
two all-American swimmers from Stanford. And everything about ROKA
eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
the biology, the visual system, and I can tell you that
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to a shady area and back again, whether or not
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that's R-O-K-A-- .com and enter the code Huberman
to save 20% off on your first order. Again, that's roka-- R-O-K-A--
.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
understand your body and help you reach
your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
and long-term health can only be analyzed with
a quality blood test. One of the major issues
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try InsideTracker, you can go to
insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | And then the other thing I was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add 15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000 steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000 were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind that because actually I spoke to Satchin, and it turns out that the graduate student in his lab did that initial study, which was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is a really great point that people don't realize when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like scientific studies. And | 2 | 4 | 6 | And then the other thing I was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add 15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous activity that they're not even aware of goes down. | That's a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000 steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000 were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind that because actually I spoke to Satchin, and it turns out that the graduate student in his lab did that initial study, which was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- | 2,1,6 | 8,2,5 | 2 | 1 | 6 | 8 | 2 | 5 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
those electrolytes and maintain mental clarity
and energy throughout the day. LMNT contains a science
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you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
two all-American swimmers from Stanford. And everything about ROKA
eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
the biology, the visual system, and I can tell you that
your visual system has to contend with an enormous
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to a shady area and back again, whether or not
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to save 20% off on your first order. Again, that's roka-- R-O-K-A--
.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
understand your body and help you reach
your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
and long-term health can only be analyzed with
a quality blood test. One of the major issues
with a lot of blood and DNA tests out there, however, is
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try InsideTracker, you can go to
insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | supplemented, told they weren't, supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: This is incredible. I have to get this study well so we can link to a colleague of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of your memory and cognitive functioning and then you give them a memory test, they perform well below baseline. If you tell them that stress sharpens them in the short term, and that adrenaline is this powerful molecule that can really tune up a number of memory systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any number of different things, including food allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate, and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect of believing it's great and it | 8 | 6 | 2 | Oh, yeah. | Really. This is incredible. I have to get this study well so we can link to a colleague of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of your memory and cognitive functioning and then you give them a memory test, they perform well below baseline. If you tell them that stress sharpens them in the short term, and that adrenaline is this powerful molecule that can really tune up a number of memory systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any number of different things, including food allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate, and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- | 2,1,5 | 8,6,8 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 8 | 6 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
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cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
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drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
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and sunglasses that are of the absolute
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
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InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
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podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
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livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | seems to show that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't tend to compensate at least fully for the amount of movement they do. And there is some evidence that-- you've probably heard people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out how many calories you should be burning from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less, but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well, one thing I would say is that, exercise independent of anything that happens with your body weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the only things that will actually improve your biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record several times now saying that of all the things that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from regular exercise | 4 | 2 | 6 | I have a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less, but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle in our sibling relationship. | Well, one thing I would say is that, exercise independent of anything that happens with your body weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the only things that will actually improve your biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? | 2,1,3 | 8,6,9 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 8 | 6 | 9 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
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electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
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cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
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drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
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livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | is-- far outweighs all of those things combined. Not that those things don't necessarily work, we're not going through them in detail now, but that exercise is by far the best thing we can do for our health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking about weight loss, people miss the point of exercise, I think. There's some work that came out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically showed like, well, if you do 100 calories from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK, well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK, and the other thing is, I think the effects of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who lose weight and keep it off for a number of years, kind of outliers because most people don't keep it off for years, over 70% of them engage in regular exercise. Of people who do not keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just a correlation. That doesn't necessarily prove causation. But there are some pretty compelling studies showing that exercise increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive to them when | 2 | 4 | 6 | is-- far outweighs all of those things combined. Not that those things don't necessarily work, we're not going through them in detail now, but that exercise is by far the best thing we can do for our health span and lifespan. | Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking about weight loss, people miss the point of exercise, I think. There's some work that came out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically showed like, well, if you do 100 calories from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK, well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK, and the other thing is, I think the effects of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who lose weight and keep it off for a number of years, kind of outliers because most people don't keep it off for years, over 70% of them engage in regular exercise. Of people who do not keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just a correlation. That doesn't necessarily prove causation. But there are some pretty compelling studies showing that exercise increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive to them when | 8,4,9 | 9,6,8 | 8 | 4 | 9 | 9 | 6 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
those electrolytes and maintain mental clarity
and energy throughout the day. LMNT contains a science
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you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
two all-American swimmers from Stanford. And everything about ROKA
eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
the biology, the visual system, and I can tell you that
your visual system has to contend with an enormous
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to a shady area and back again, whether or not
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to save 20% off on your first order. Again, that's roka-- R-O-K-A--
.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
understand your body and help you reach
your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
and long-term health can only be analyzed with
a quality blood test. One of the major issues
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try InsideTracker, you can go to
insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | you exercise. And there's actually a really classic study from the 1950s in Bengali workers where they looked at, basically, four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on their job choice. And they didn't have an intervention. They just wanted to track them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary actually ate more food than the lightly active or moderately active. But from lightly active to heavily active, they almost perfectly compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests, when you become active, you can actually regulate your appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And do you think this has to do with changes in the brain-- brain centers that respond to satiety signals from the periphery, and/or do you think it has to do with changes in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I don't know if this is still considered true, is that spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps, falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that tastes really good, and | 2 | 4 | 6 | you exercise. And there's actually a really classic study from the 1950s in Bengali workers where they looked at, basically, four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on their job choice. And they didn't have an intervention. They just wanted to track them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary actually ate more food than the lightly active or moderately active. But from lightly active to heavily active, they almost perfectly compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests, when you become active, you can actually regulate your appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than if you're sedentary. | And do you think this has to do with changes in the brain-- brain centers that respond to satiety signals from the periphery, and/or do you think it has to do with changes in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I don't know if this is still considered true, is that spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps, falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that tastes really good, and | 3,2,5 | 2,4,8 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 2 | 4 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
those electrolytes and maintain mental clarity
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you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
two all-American swimmers from Stanford. And everything about ROKA
eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
the biology, the visual system, and I can tell you that
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to a shady area and back again, whether or not
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
understand your body and help you reach
your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
and long-term health can only be analyzed with
a quality blood test. One of the major issues
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try InsideTracker, you can go to
insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | you are suddenly on the train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine how exercise, if it is increasing the satiety signals, could be working a number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic, yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and my stomach's growling. Like those are-- they can go together, but usually like the hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm going to pass out. You want to eat something not because your stomach's growling but because that you just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I've been there when I've done the longer fasts, something I don't do anymore and drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling like, I needed something. This whole thing like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be back here again. Hypoglycemia is very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing some exercise where they're pretty controlled environment, they typically see | -2 | 4 | 2 | you are suddenly on the train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine how exercise, if it is increasing the satiety signals, could be working a number of different ways. | Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic, yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and my stomach's growling. Like those are-- they can go together, but usually like the hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm going to pass out. You want to eat something not because your stomach's growling but because that you just need some fuel. | 2,4,5 | 3,2,6 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
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to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
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eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
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your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
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InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I even see this with-- you know, how one person will pick up the phone and then everyone picks up their phone. I think there's a similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have we either done it ourselves or have been experienced people saying, oh, you should have something-- you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out with somebody last night and I had a beer and they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans, we're hurt animals. We don't want to be doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous, I guess, belief of mine. But doing things alone in isolation during ancestral times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were done together in groups. And I think that's a lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: | 5 | 2 | 4 | I was hanging out with somebody last night and I had a beer and they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans, we're hurt animals. We don't want to be doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous, I guess, belief of mine. But doing things alone in isolation during ancestral times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were done together in groups. And I think that's a lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- | I even see this with-- you know, how one person will pick up the phone and then everyone picks up their phone. I think there's a similar effect with food. Boredom. Yeah. | 3,4,6 | 5,6,8 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 5 | 6 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
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or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
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drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
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livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called AG1,
is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your
foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking Athletic
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taking Athletic Greens, and the reason I still
take athletic Greens, once or usually twice a day, is
that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very
important, it's populated by gut microbiota
that communicate with the brain, the immune
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and Athletic Greens are optimal and vital
for microbiotic health. In addition, Athletic
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vitamins, and minerals that make sure that all of my
foundational or nutritional needs are met. And it tastes great. If you'd like to
try Athletic Greens, you can go to
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you five free travel packs that make it
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on the road, in the car, on the plane, et cetera. And they'll give you a year's
supply of vitamin D3, K2. Again, that's
athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | ways, bulimia and anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic, you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly important points. And to my knowledge, I don't think anyone has really described it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people to understand this because obviously, as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we can talk about that. But I really appreciate that you're spelling out how there are these different variables. Each one can account for a number of different things. Exercise clearly has a remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise in terms of caloric burn and overall health and biomarkers. And then this is wonderful to learn that it can increase the sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes-- at least in | 6 | 4 | 8 | ways, bulimia and anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic, you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive with how we treat these things. | Right. These are incredibly important points. And to my knowledge, I don't think anyone has really described it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people to understand this because obviously, as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we can talk about that. But I really appreciate that you're spelling out how there are these different variables. Each one can account for a number of different things. Exercise clearly has a remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise in terms of caloric burn and overall health and biomarkers. And then this is wonderful to learn that it can increase the sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes-- at least in | 3,4,6 | 8,5,9 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 5 | 9 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
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you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
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eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
understand your body and help you reach
your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
and long-term health can only be analyzed with
a quality blood test. One of the major issues
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try InsideTracker, you can go to
insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount of body weight in their life. So why do we still have an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the research, basically, what it suggests is because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin once and that's it, right? You've got to take it continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to where you were, if not more. You can't create a new version of yourself while dragging your old habits and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well, I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that for the rest of your life? And if the | 2 | 6 | 4 | Sorry. You were about to say. | That gets actually into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount of body weight in their life. So why do we still have an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the research, basically, what it suggests is because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin once and that's it, right? You've got to take it continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to where you were, if not more. You can't create a new version of yourself while dragging your old habits and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well, I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that for the rest of your life? And if the | 0,0,0 | 5,7,8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 7 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
sodium, potassium, and magnesium, the so-called
electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
the form of LMNT electrolyte mix, I'm able to replenish
those electrolytes and maintain mental clarity
and energy throughout the day. LMNT contains a science
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you can go to drinklmnt-- spelled L-M-N-T-- .com/huberman
to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
two all-American swimmers from Stanford. And everything about ROKA
eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
performance in mind. I've spent a lifetime working on
the biology, the visual system, and I can tell you that
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
understand your body and help you reach
your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
that many of the factors that impact your immediate
and long-term health can only be analyzed with
a quality blood test. One of the major issues
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try InsideTracker, you can go to
insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off any of
InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | and none of them were better for adherence overall. But when they stratified people just according from lowest adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear effect on weight loss. So really what it says is, what is the diet that's going to be easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you should probably do that? And people-- again, this is where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say, well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the rest of your life? Is this going to be something sustainable for you? And if the answer is, no, you probably need to rethink what your approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there was a version of highlight or boldface and underline in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and underline what you just said. And for those of you that heard it, listen to it twice, and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over with the placebo effect. I almost want to say, pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick to for a long period of time, | 7 | 5 | 8 | and none of them were better for adherence overall. But when they stratified people just according from lowest adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear effect on weight loss. So really what it says is, what is the diet that's going to be easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you should probably do that? And people-- again, this is where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say, well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the rest of your life? Is this going to be something sustainable for you? And if the answer is, no, you probably need to rethink what your approach is going to be. | Incredibly important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there was a version of highlight or boldface and underline in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and underline what you just said. And for those of you that heard it, listen to it twice, and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over with the placebo effect. I almost want to say, pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick to for a long period of time, | 4,2,6 | 8,4,8 | 4 | 2 | 6 | 8 | 4 | 8 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
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electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
cell in our body, and in particular
cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
after during exercise or after doing the sauna. So by drinking electrolytes in
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to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
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eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
from your blood and DNA to help you better
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your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
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InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
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podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | ideally forever. And pick your placebo too, because there is a lot of placebo woven into each and every one of these things-- intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a diet and you're all fired up about it and like you're very adherent, and then what happens, with every single diet without exception in research studies is once you get past few months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology where it's a story that you co-create with somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up with somebody that was referring to romantic love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how you feel in the moment, it's also that you project into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this parallel up artificially, I'm setting up | 6 | 4 | 8 | Well, they even talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a diet and you're all fired up about it and like you're very adherent, and then what happens, with every single diet without exception in research studies is once you get past few months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. | ideally forever. And pick your placebo too, because there is a lot of placebo woven into each and every one of these things-- intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus omnivore versus carnivore. | 2,-3,5 | 3,4,6 | 2 | -3 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
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electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
me discuss before on this podcast, every
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cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
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drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
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livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called AG1,
is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your
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sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started
taking Athletic Greens, and the reason I still
take athletic Greens, once or usually twice a day, is
that it gets me the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | because I think that ultimately it boils down to what you said earlier, which is that the brain and our decisions about what we are going to stick to are tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most biomarkers of health. Same thing for low carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories and protein. There was a meta analysis done by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and again, actual loss of body fat. And another important point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided food to the participants That's important because that ensures that adherence can be much higher in those studies whereas various free living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: --eating the way that the study would ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON: Unless the person is getting like continuous support-- like, studies where they have a dietician talk to people like every week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive to have done the study. And again, like what limits studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low fat, | 2 | 4 | 6 | because I think that ultimately it boils down to what you said earlier, which is that the brain and our decisions about what we are going to stick to are tremendously powerful. | I think one thing I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most biomarkers of health. Same thing for low carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories and protein. There was a meta analysis done by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and again, actual loss of body fat. And another important point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided food to the participants That's important because that ensures that adherence can be much higher in those studies whereas various free living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. | 6,4,8 | 4,6,7 | 6 | 4 | 8 | 4 | 6 | 7 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 13,774 | K4Ze-Sp6aUE | 2022-11-07 00:00:00 | ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to
the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of neurobiology
and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, my guest is
Dr. Layne Norton. Dr. Norton is one of
the foremost experts in protein metabolism,
fat loss, and nutrition. He did his degrees in
biochemistry and nutritional sciences and is considered
one of the world experts in understanding how we
extract energy from our food and how exercise and what we
eat combine to impact things like body composition
and overall health. Today, we discuss an
enormous number of topics under the umbrella of
nutrition and fitness, including, for instance,
what is energy balance? That is, how do we actually
extract energy from our food? We also discuss the
somewhat controversial topic of artificial sweeteners,
whether or not they are safe or not
and whether or not they are an effective
tool for weight loss, in particular, for
people suffering from obesity and different
types of diabetes. We also talk about gut health--
that is the gut microbiome-- and how it's impacted
by food and how it can actually impact the
metabolism of the foods that we eat. We also discuss fasting, or
so-called intermittent fasting or time-restricted
feeding, what it does and what it does not do in
terms of how effective it is for weight loss and, perhaps,
even for health and longevity. We also talk about protein
and define very clearly how much protein each
and all of us need, depending on our daily
activities and life demands. We discuss the
various types of diets that you've probably
heard about, including ketogenic diets,
vegan diets, vegetarian diets, and pure carnivore diets, as
well as more typical omnivore diets, and how to
make sure that you get all of the
essential amino acids that are critical for healthy
weight maintenance, weight loss, or directed muscle gain. We also talk about supplements,
in particular, the supplements for which there is an immense
amount of science pointing to their safety and
efficacy for fitness and for overall
body composition. What I'm sure will
become clear to you, as you hear Layne
talk about each and every one of
these topics, is that he has an incredible
ability to both understand the mechanistic science
but also the real world applications of the various
discoveries that are made in particular papers
and, in particular, in the randomized
controlled trials. That is when a given scientific
hypothesis has been raised. He's extremely good at
understanding why it was raised but also at evaluating
whether or not it works in the
real world, which is what I believe most everybody
out there is concerned with. I think this is one of
the things that really distinguishes him
from the other voices in the nutritional landscape. I assure you that by the
end of today's discussion, you will have a much clearer
understanding about what the science says about
nutrition, about fitness, and about how different diets
and fitness programs combine to achieve the
results that you want. Before we begin, I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part
of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to
consumer information about science and
science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with
that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors
of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink
with everything you need and nothing that you don't. That means it contains
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electrolytes, but no sugar. As you may have heard
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cells within our brain, the so-called neurons
or nerve cells, critically rely on the
presence of electrolytes-- sodium, magnesium, and
potassium-- in order to function properly. I, myself, am a big believer
in consuming electrolytes any time I've been
sweating a lot, so that could be
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to get a free sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's
drinkL-M-N-T.com/huberman to get the free sample pack. Today's, episode is also
brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses
and sunglasses that are of the absolute
highest quality. The company was founded by
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eyeglasses and sunglasses were designed with
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.com and enter the code Huberman at checkout. Today's episode is also
brought to us by InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition program that analyzes data
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your health goals. Now, I've long been a believer
in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason
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InsideTrackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker
Huberman to get 20% off. The Huberman Lab
podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we
discuss on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to
livemomentous-- spelled O-U-S-- livemomentous.com/huberman. And I should just
mention that the library of those supplements is
constantly expanding. Again, that's
livemomentous.com/huberman. And now, for my discussion
with Dr. Layne Norton. Layne, Dr. Norton, thank
you so much for being here. This is a long time coming. And I have to say, I'm really
excited because I've seen you in the social media sphere. I've also listened to a
number of your other podcasts. And as a fellow PhD scientist,
I feel a great kinship with you. I know you have
tremendous experience in fitness and nutrition,
a number of areas. We also got a lot of
questions from our audience. And I'm really looking forward
to talking with you today. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah,
I'm excited, too. I mean, like you said,
it's been something we've been talking
about for a long time. So I was glad we were
able to make it happen. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah, indeed. And I think some
of the audience has requested a debate or a battle. And I can tell you right now,
it's not going to happen. Actually, one of the things that
brought Layne and I together, in conversation online and
then via text, et cetera, was the fact that I
love to be corrected, and that's what happened. I did a post about
artificial sweeteners, which we will talk about a little
bit later in the episode, and Layne pointed out some areas
of the study that I had missed or, maybe, even misunderstood. And I revised my opinions
and I think it's wonderful. And other studies have
come out since then. So hopefully, our
conversation will serve as a message of how
science and actionable science can be perceived and
that it doesn't always have to be a battle. But hey, if we get into
it, we get into it. It won't get physical because
we know you would win. So in any case, I'd like
to start with something that's rather basic and
yet can be pretty complex, and that's this issue of energy
balance and energy utilization. I think most people
have heard of a calorie. I am assuming that most
people don't actually know what that is in
terms of how it works, what it represents. And so maybe you
could just explain for people what happens when
we eat food, of any kind, and how is that
actually converted into energy, as a way of framing
up the discussion around weight loss, weight maintenance, weight
gain, and body composition. LAYNE NORTON: So it's
a great question. And like you said, this is one
of those things where people use the term calories
in, calories out, and they say, well,
that's way too simplistic. I'm like, if you look at what
actually makes up calories in, calories out, it's
actually very complicated. So let's deal with what
you mentioned first. What is the calorie? Because I think a lot of people
don't quite understand this. So a calorie just refers to
a unit of energy, of heat specifically. And so what does that
have to do with food? What does that have to do
with what we digest and eat? Really, what you're
talking about is the potential
chemical energy that is in the bonds of the
macronutrients of food. And by digesting,
assimilating, and metabolizing those nutrients, we
are able to create energy and the in-product
of that, mostly, is ATP, adenosine triphosphate,
which is your body's energy currency. So to understand ATP,
just try to think about-- if you're trying to power
these various reactions in your body-- and we're talking
about tens of thousands of enzymes that require ATP-- it doesn't make
sense that you would have to create a bunch
of micro explosions. You want something that can
transfer high-energy phosphates to power these
reactions, to give up essentially its energy
to power something that might otherwise
be unfavorable. So a lot of metabolism
is simply creating ATP, which the end
of the line of that-- I'm going to work
backwards-- is what's called oxidative respiration. So that happens in
the mitochondria. Everybody's heard mitochondria,
a powerhouse of the cell. And that is done through
essentially creating a hydrogen ion gradient across
the mitochondria, which powers the production
of ATP by converting free phosphate plus ATP to ADP. Now the way that hydrogen
ion gradient is created is through creating hydrogen
ions that can be donated through the Krebs cycle. Now the Krebs cycle is
linked to glycolysis. So if we talk about
carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrates basically,
other than fructose, get converted into glucose,
which can go into glycolysis, and you can produce some
ATPs through glycolysis. And then it boils
down to pyruvate, then acetyl-CoA, which
goes to the Krebs cycle, produces a lot more
ATPs from that. If you talk about
protein, protein is a little bit different
because protein gets converted to amino acids,
which can be used for muscle protein
synthesis or protein synthesis in other tissues. But it also can be converted
through gluconeogenesis to glucose. And there also are some
ketogenic amino acids as well. And so you can have
a few different ways to get to the Krebs cycle. Either being through
acetyl-CoA or through glucose going through the
glycolysis to pyruvate. Then you have fatty acids,
which are able to create energy through what's called beta
oxidation where, essentially, you're taking these fatty
acids and you're lopping them off two carbons at a time
to produce acetyl-CoA which, again, can go into
the Krebs cycle, produce those hydrogen
ions that can then power the production of ATP. So that's kind of like
at the cellular level of how this stuff works. But stepping back and
taking it back out, what does that have to do with
weight loss or weight gain? Well, when you think about
the balance of energy in versus energy out. Sounds very simple. But let's look at
what actually makes up energy in versus energy out. First of all, you've
got to realize that the energy
inside of the equation is more difficult to
track than people think. So one, food labels,
which we like to think as being
from upon high, can have up to a
20% error in them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really? LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
So a 100 calorie-- something listed as 100
calories per serving, it could-- what's actually
in there could be 80 or 120. LAYNE NORTON: Right. Exactly. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect is there's
what's called your energy, but then there's also
metabolizable energy. So if you have food stuff with
say, a lot of insoluble fiber, typically, insoluble fiber
is not really digestible, and so you could have "quite
a bit of carbohydrate," know but if you can't extract
the energy from it-- and typically, this is
because insoluble fiber from plant material, the
carbohydrate and even some of the protein is bound up
in the plant structure, which makes it inaccessible
to digestive enzymes. And so this is what adds bulk
to your stool and whatnot. But again, reduces the
metabolizable energy in there. And there's some
evidence that based on people's individual gut
microbiome, that some people may actually be better at
extracting energy out of fiber compared to other people. So just starting
off right there, OK, there's quite a bit of play
in the energy inside of things. Now, one of the
things people will say is, well, see that's
why you shouldn't worry about tracking calories, because
the food levels can be 20% off. And what I'll say is, OK. I understand where
you're coming from. But typically, if it's off, it's
going to be consistently off. And if you're consistent
with how you track it, eventually, you'll be able to
know what you're taking in. And that's like saying, well,
don't worry about tracking if you're-- I like to use
financial examples. We know that to
save money, you have to earn more money
than you spend. Well, you can't exactly
know how much money you're earning at a time
because there's inflation and then there is-- if you have investments, those
can be different interest rates and whatnot. It's like, OK, if
you have a budget, you have a reasonable idea
of what it's going to be. And you make
certain assumptions, but you can relatively guess. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. That's a good example. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So now, let's look
at the energy outside of the equation, which is
actually way more complicated. And so your energy out is
a few different buckets. The first one and
the biggest one is your resting metabolic rate. So your RMR. And that, for most people,
is anywhere from 50% to 70% of your total daily
energy expenditure. Now, people use the term
metabolic rate and energy expenditure interchangeably,
but they're not the same thing. So your total daily
energy expenditure is the summation of all the
energy you expend in a day. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Walking upstairs, exercise if you do it-- LAYNE NORTON: Fidgeting. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Plus your resting
metabolic rate. LAYNE NORTON: Right. So resting metabolic rate
is a big part of that, but it's not the only thing. So that's usually
about 50% to 70%. And sedentary people will be
on the higher end of that. So it'll be a bigger
proportion whereas people who are more active, it'll
be a little bit lower, not because their metabolic
rate is lower, but because they're
expending a greater percentage of their calories
from physical activity. Then you have something
called the thermic effect of food, which is a
relatively small percentage of your total daily
energy expenditure. It's about 5% to 10%. And very difficult to
measure and usually what researchers do when
they're looking at this stuff is they just make an
assumption about it. They use a constant. But that's about 5% to 10% of
your daily energy expenditure. And that refers to
the amount of energy it takes to extract
the energy out of food. So think about your
body like a car. You don't just have
gas in your tank and it spontaneously starts up. You have to have a battery
so you put in energy so you can get the energy
out of the petrol that you have in your car. Similar with food, you
can't just eat food and then it just
appears in your cells and you start doing stuff. It has to be
systematically broken down and put into forms that
can actually produce energy. And so you have to put some
energy in to achieve that. And a lot of times,
people will say something like, well, not all
calories are created equal. That's not true, because calorie
is just a unit of measurement. That would be like saying
not all seconds on a clock are created equal. Yes, they are. All sources of calories may have
differential effects on energy expenditure and appetite. So if we look at something
like fat, for example, the TEF of fat is
about 0% to 3%. Meaning, if you eat
100 calories from fat, your net will be
about 97 to 100. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So the
process of breaking down that fat, essentially,
subtracts some of the calories away because you used
it in creating energy-- LAYNE NORTON: Correct. ANDREW HUBERMAN: --by
breaking those chemical bonds to create ATP. LAYNE NORTON: Correct. Correct. So you have like, for example,
some enzymes that require ATP to run these processes. Now, fat is actually the easiest
thing to convert into energy. Then you have
carbohydrate, which has a TEF of like 5% to 10%. So you eat 100 calories
from carbohydrate. And obviously, the fiber content
makes a big difference on this. But if you eat 100
calories, you'll net 92 95. Protein is about
a 20% to 30% TEF. So if you eat
calories from protein, you're only netting 70 to 80. Now, you're still net-- people say, well, you
can't eat too much protein. Well, people will ask, well,
can protein be stored as fat? The carbon's from
protein it's unlikely, it's going to wind
up in adipose tissue. But if you're eating
a lot of protein, overall as part of a lot of
calories, it has to be oxidized and it can't provide a calorie
cushion for other things to be stored in fat. But protein itself does provide
a net positive for calories, but less so than
carbohydrate or fat. And tends to be more satiating. So again, when people talk about
are all calories created equal, yes, but all sources
of calories may have differential effects
on energy expenditure and appetite. So that's the TEF bucket
and the BMR bucket. Then we go to physical activity. And physical activity is,
essentially, two parts. There's exercise, which is kind
of your purposeful movements like you go out for a walk,
you do a training session. I mean, whatever. Any purposeful activity. And then you have
what's called NEAT which is non-exercise activity
thermogenesis, which I think is actually really cool. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
It's fascinating. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. It is. So I was actually hanging
out with somebody last night and I was noticing them,
they were fidgeting their feet and their fingers. And I said, have you
always been pretty lean? And they were like,
yeah, I never really had a problem
maintaining leanness. And when you look at the
obese resistant phenotype, people think they
have high BMR or they exercise a lot and really
what it seems to be as neat. They tend to-- if they
overeat, they just spontaneously increase
their physical activity. Now, people get NEAT confused. I've heard people say,
well, I'm going to go out for a walk to get my NEAT up. That's not NEAT. NEAT is not something you
can consciously modify. What you're doing there, if
it's purposeful, it's exercise. So for example,
when I'm talking, if I'm waving around my
hands, if I'm tapping my feet, if I'm-- whatever. That's NEAT. But trying to get yourself-- I'm just going to
tap my foot more, well, now if I'm
consciously having to do this, then my focus-- I mean, you know
how the brain works. Very hard to do-- you don't really do
two things at once. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. LAYNE NORTON: You switch
quickly between tasks, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Absolutely. Can I quickly ask, was the
person that you were referring to our friend Ben Bruno? LAYNE NORTON: No, no. But he is fidgety too. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Amazing online fitness channel. He's a freakishly
strong individual. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. And I can't remember
whether or not, Ben, you're a fidgetter or not. But anyway, I'll
have to go check and we'll measure
your fidgeting. About non-exercise induced
thermogenesis NEAT, my understanding of the old
papers on this, old being, I guess, back to
the mid '90s, is that the calorie burn from NEAT
is actually pretty significant. We're not talking about 100
calories or 200 calories per day. We're talking about,
in some cases, hundreds of thousand-- excuse
me, hundreds to maybe even close to 1,000 calories per day. Could you elaborate on that? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So there was actually a really
classic study, I think, from-- I want to say it's
from Levine in 1995. It was metabolic ward study. And hopefully, I don't
butcher the study because I'm trying to
pull it out of my brain. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I don't expect
you to have that in your head. Although, I must say, you have
a quite extensive PubMed ID, grab bag in there. So-- LAYNE NORTON: I try
to bring the receipts. I try to bring the receipts. ANDREW HUBERMAN: We will put a
link to this study in the show note captions. So people can peruse it
if they like it, yeah. LAYNE NORTON: So I believe
they had people overeat. And I think it was by
like 1,000 calories a day and I think for six weeks. And I mean, this is
the metabolic ward. So this is very
tightly controlled. It's as tight as you get. And what was interesting
is, of course, on average, people gained weight
and gained fat mass. But some people gained
more than expected, and there was one person, in
particular, who only gained like just over 1/2 a kilo. They should have gained like-- I think it was something
like 3 to 4 kilos. It was predicted. And what they found
is this individual just spontaneously increased
their physical activity. He didn't purposefully
do it, it just happened. And I mean,
anecdotally, I've seen people who are, again,
very lean even eat a meal, sit down, and start sweating. And be very fidgety. There was a natural
bodybuilder back in the day named Jim Cordova. And this guy was just
very lean all the time, and he was exactly
that phenotype. He would walk up
a flight of stairs and all of a sudden
he's sweating. Sit down eat a
meal, he's sweating. He's just-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: He's a furnace. LAYNE NORTON: Just
expending energy. And what's very
interesting about NEAT is that seems to be
the most modifiable-- I mean, exercise
is very modifiable because you can be
intentional with that. But of BMR, TEF,
and NEAT, NEAT seems to be far more modifiable. So even a bodyweight
reduction of 10%, they've observed
a decrease in NEAT of almost 500 calories a day for
a 10% reduction in body weight. Now, you also do
get a decline in BMR when you lose weight,
one, because you're just in a smaller body now and
so it takes less energy to lock them out. But also there's what's called
metabolic adaptation, which is a further reduction
in your BMR than expected from the loss of body mass. And that's on average
usually around like 15%. But it does seem to be-- there's new evidence coming
out on the metabolic adaptation from BMR. And it seems to
be a little bit-- kind of in the
transition phases. So if you start a diet
within the first few weeks, you will have a reduction
in BMR that then just-- thereafter, any
further reduction is mostly from the amount
of body mass you lose. And then if you, like for
example, finish a diet and move your calories
to maintenance, within a few weeks, BMR
starts to come back up. There is still a
small reduction, but I used to be
somebody who thought that BMR, metabolic
adaptation was a big reason why people stopped
losing weight or plateaued. And now, I think it's
much more to do with NEAT. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Interesting. And you said that it
can't be conscious because that will distract
us from other activities. I don't know if you've had a
chance to look at this study. And I'll send it to you. Maybe I'd be fun to do a kind
of an online journal club about this at some point soon. But there's a study that came
out of University of Houston recently having people do, now,
this is a long period of time. Four hours a day of, basically,
a soleus pushup, which is basically a heel raise. A seated catchphrase with
one foot not weighted. And then they
looked at it a bunch of things about glucose
metabolism and glucose clearance and insulin levels. And they didn't
conclude that people burned a ton of
calories, but what they concluded was that blood
sugar regulation improved greatly. And I think, there was
a lot of excitement about this at some
level, but based on everything you're telling
me, this fits perfectly with what's known about neat. So this fell somewhere
in between with-- in between, excuse me,
sort of deliberate exercise and spontaneous movement. I guess they've tried to make
that spontaneous movement a little bit more conscious. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
what I'll tell people is if you're
worried about NEAT, one thing you can do,
like these watches, for example where people
are like, oh, well, told me I burned
these many calories. They are not accurate
for energy expenditure. I mean, it is like, there
was a meta analysis in 2018, I want to say,
between a 28% and 93% overestimation of energy
expenditure by these watches. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Fitness track. So for those of you
listening, we're not going to name the brand. But fitness trackers-- so
wrist-worn fitness trackers. LAYNE NORTON: And this
is across the board. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. LAYNE NORTON: So like
depending on the brand, it could be more or
less but, they all overestimated the amount of-- the calories you
burn from exercise. So this is actually a great
example where people go, well, calories in, calories
out doesn't work for me, because I eat in a calorie
deficit, I didn't lose weight. When I talk to
them, usually, they went to an online calculator. It's a few things. They went to an
online calculator, put in their information, it spat
out some calories to eat, and they ate that and
didn't lose weight. And it's like, well, what
do you think is more likely? That you're defying the laws
of conservation of energy or that you might
have not gotten the right number for you? ANDREW HUBERMAN: The
measurement tool was off. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. The next thing is a lot of
people weigh very sporadically. And I'll tell people
like, if you're going to make an intentional
weight loss a goal, and again, this can be
different for different people, but typically, I
tell people, weigh in, first thing in the
morning or after you go to the bathroom,
do it every day, and take the average
of that for the week. And then compare that to
the next week's average. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Can I ask
one-- sorry to interrupt, but one quick question
about that when you say, go to the bathroom not
to get too detailed here unnecessarily, but are you
talking about urination and emptying your bowels? Ideally, because you did eat
a big meal the night before. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Got it. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: So wake up,
use the bathroom in all forms that you're ready, and
then get on the scale, take that measurement, average
that across the week, and then maybe every Monday,
you take that value and see how it progresses. LAYNE NORTON: All right. And the reason I recommend
doing that is, if you're just sporadically weighing in, as
somebody who weighs themselves pretty regularly,
I mean, my weight will fluctuate 5, 6 pounds, and
not seemingly changing much. And that's just-- those
short term changes are fluid. So I've had it before,
where week to week, my average didn't change. But between the lowest weigh
in from a previous week and the highest weigh in, might
have been like 8 pounds, right? So if you're somebody who
just randomly is weighing in and you're eating in
a calorie deficit, and you just weigh in
one day where you've just whatever reason holding some
more fluid, then you're oh, see, this isn't working when
in reality, your average might be dropping. So that's one of the
reasons, and actually, believe it or not,
weight fluctuations are actually identified as a
major reason why people get discouraged from weight loss. It stops the buy-in, when
they have a fluctuation up. So that's one of the reasons-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Great point. LAYNE NORTON: --one
of the reasons early on that low carb diets
tend to work really well is because people
lose a lot of water weight really quickly, and
they get that buy-in. So they're, oh, this is working. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. We can return to
that in a little bit because I have theories
as to how that-- when people eat
less carbohydrate, they excrete more
water, and they'll see-- for the first time, they'll see
some definition in their abs, oh, my God, this diet's amazing. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And the fluid
loss does hold that promise. I think fluid loss can
do some other things. It might make people
literally feel lighter, although it can be-- it
has some negative effects. I do have one quick
question, and I do want-- we will return
to NEAT in a moment. But when you say,
the caloric burn as a consequence
of exercise, I want to ask about the caloric
burn during that exercise? So for instance, if
somebody is on the treadmill and they'll see, OK,
they burn 400 calories. Actually, I think
this is a month where a number of
prominent podcasters like Bert Kreischer, Tom
Segura, Joe Rogan, and others, I think they call
it "Sober October," but in addition to
avoiding alcohol, they're burning 500 calories
per day during the exercise. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
They're measuring it. A lot of people do this. They think-- they take
track of weather-- excuse me, take stock of how
many calories they burned. My understanding is that if
that particular form of exercise is a muscle building
form of exercise, that at some point later, there
might be an increase in muscle if you did everything
right, do everything right, and then you will
burn more energy as a consequence of
adding that tissue. That's a long process
as and we will discuss. But I have heard about this
post-exercise induced increase in oxidative metabolism. I'm probably not using the
right language in here. So if I were to go out, for
instance, and do some sprints. Run hard for a minute, jog for
a minute, run hard for a minute, and do that 10 times over. Let's assume I burn 400 calories
during that exercise bout. But my understanding is that
in the hours that follow, my basal metabolic rate
will have increased. Is that true, and is
it significant enough to care about? LAYNE NORTON: So answer
both of those questions. Yes, there does seem
to be a small increase in metabolic rate,
and no, it does not appear to be enough to
actually make a difference. So when they look at-- and again, this is
where I tell people-- I think I have a good
perspective on this, because my undergraduate degree
was a biochemistry degree. So I was very into mechanisms. You know what I mean? It was like, oh, if we just do
this and this, we'll get this. And then I did nutrition
as a graduate degree, and then my advisor was so great
because you could do something over here and he could tell
you how it would affect vitamin D metabolism over here. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is Don Lemon? LAYNE NORTON: Yeah, Don Lemon. So he would always
kind of say, yeah, but what's the outcome
going to be, right? So this is actually one of the
things I changed my mind on. Was I used to be
very much, well, I think high intensity interval
training is probably better because you get this
post-exercise energy burn which they do see in
some of these studies. But in the meta analyzes and
more tightly controlled studies where they equate work between
high intensity intervals and moderate or low intensity
cardio, so equating work, they don't see differences
in the loss of body fat. And so to me, if I'm
looking like, that's the example of a
mechanism, which is OK, we're seeing this small increase
in basal metabolic rate, that should lead to
increased loss of body fat. But again, remember, you're
capturing a snapshot in time. But we don't see a difference
in the loss of body fat. So what may be happening-- and
again, I'm just speculating. But a way to explain it could
be, you might have an increase and then you might actually
have a decrease that tends to just wash it out, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: I see. And I have to imagine
some forms of exercise. This would be highly individual,
but will spike appetite more than others. So for instance, if I go out
for a 45-minute jog which I do. A 45 to 60-minute hike or
jog once a week, I just make it a point to do that or
ruck or something like that. Throw on a weight vest and hike. After that, I find I'm very
thirsty, I want to hydrate. But I'm not that hungry. And that's true of all
cardiovascular exercise for me. But after I weight train,
about 60 to 90 minutes later, I want to eat the refrigerator. And so obviously,
calories in, calories out dictates that that will
play an important role as to whether or not I gain or
lose weight, et cetera. So is it safe to say that
the specific form of exercise that people choose needs to
be taken in consideration? Calories in, calories
out, so how much is burned during the exercise? Also how much that exercise
tends to stimulate appetite. I don't know whether
or not people explore this in their rigorous studies. And whether or not
that form of exercise actually increases lean
muscle mass or not. Now, we've taken
exercise and split it into a number of
different dimensions, but this is what you are
so masterful at is really parsing how the different
components work individually and together. So if you would
just expand on that, I'd love to know
what you're thinking. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So this is actually a
really fascinating thing. So first thing, I
want to just go back to talking about like, for
example, Bert and Tom and Joe, we're going to do 500
calories a day on whatever. So those apparatuses
don't measure those things effectively either. Just like these watches. But the one thing I will
say is, if you are-- like for example, if I do two
hours of resistance training, typically, this will say I
burned about 1,000 calories. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's a
lot of resistance training. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
My weight workouts are warm up for 10 minutes and
then one hour of work done. LAYNE NORTON: I just-- I love to train. ANDREW HUBERMAN: OK. And you can recover from. My recovery quotient
is pretty low. So I've been training
for 30 plus years, and I found that if I
do more than an hour of hard work in the gym,
meaning resistance training, 75 minutes maybe, I'm OK, but
past that, I have to take two, maybe even three days
off before I can train. My nervous system just
doesn't tolerate it well. So I limit it to
an hour, you know. LAYNE NORTON: And part of
that to remember is like, I've built up to that over
a long period of time. So you couldn't just throw
somebody in and start having them do two hours a day. It's not going to
go well for them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I'd like
to take a quick break, and acknowledge one of our
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athleticgreens.com/huberman to get the five free travel
packs and the year's supply of vitamin D3, K2. LAYNE NORTON: But I will say
about the calorie trackers, so if I'm used to-- OK, I usually burn about 1,000
calories according to this, it's not accurate. But if I go in tomorrow and I do
1,300, it may not be accurate-- I don't know what
the exact number is, but I can be relatively
confident that it's more than the previous session. And so in terms
of comparison, it might be OK, like
within subject. And then the other thing I
was kind of circling around on was, if you're worried about
NEAT, tracking your steps can be helpful because people
step counts can spontaneously decrease when they're
on a fat loss diet, they don't even realize it. And that, again, not
a complete measure of NEAT, but what we've had
some clients do with our team building coaches is, they'll
say OK, you're, at 8,000 steps right now. We're not going to add
any purposeful cardio. But whatever you need to do
to maintain that 8,000 steps, do that. And sometimes, they have to add
15, 20, 30 minutes of cardio, because they're spontaneous
activity that they're not even aware of goes down. ANDREW HUBERMAN: That's
a really excellent point. I've heard the 10,000
steps per day number was, we all heard that. And then I learned that, 10,000
were just kind of thrown out as an arbitrary number. So we're like get eight-hour
intermittent fasting thing, there's a story behind
that because actually I spoke to Satchin,
and it turns out that the graduate
student in his lab did that initial study, which
was on mice, by the way, was limited to being in
lab for about eight hours by their significant other. So the eight-hour feeding window
is actually the consequence of this person's relationship. So-- LAYNE NORTON: That is
a really great point that people don't realize
when they-- a lot of people will try to copy like
scientific studies. And I'll tell people like,
listen, scientific studies are so confined. You need to be very careful
with how broadly you apply what's in there. Like they're a very big hammer
is the way I look at it. They're not a scalpel,
they're a big hammer. And I think, a lot of
times in terms of coaching, scientific studies will
tell you what not to do rather than what to do, right? But getting back
to your question about exercise,
appetite, so first off, I'm not really aware if
there's evidence showing like differential effects of
different forms of exercise on appetite, it's possible,
but again, it also could be like a
placebo effect, right? Because we-- like for example,
you and I, grew up in an era where the muscle
magazines, it was like, well, as soon as you
finish your workout, you have your biggest
meal of the day. And when I say placebo
effect, I think people have the wrong idea of
what the placebo effect is. They think that's
just a feeling. Placebo effect can actually
change your physiology. People don't realize this. There's research showing
that a placebo or the power of suggestion is
basically as powerful as some pharmaceuticals. And one of the great examples
I like to use is-- actually, there was a study we just
covered in our research review on creatine where
they did four groups-- not supplemented with creatine,
told they weren't supplemented with creatine, not
supplemented, told they were supplemented,
supplemented, told they weren't,
supplemented, until they were. Basically, it just matters
what they told them. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Really. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
This is incredible. I have to get this
study well so we can link to a colleague
of mine at Stanford. She's been on the podcast. I'd love to introduce
you to because I think you guys really riff. First of all, she was
a former D1 athlete and then as runs a lab at
Stanford in psychology. This is Alia Crum. And she's-- and grew up in
this very athletic, obviously, and very, very smart. And her laboratory focuses on
these belief/placebo effects where if you tell people all
the horrible things that stress do to you in terms of
your memory and cognitive functioning and then you
give them a memory test, they perform well
below baseline. If you tell them that
stress sharpens them in the short term,
and that adrenaline is this powerful
molecule that can really tune up a number of memory
systems, memory improves. And it's remarkable. And it's consistent. And they've done this for any
number of different things, including food
allergies, for instance. Incredible results. In any case, I'm so glad
you're bringing this up. I take creatine monohydrate,
and I have for years. 5 grams a day. I don't-- LAYNE NORTON: And it's great. ANDREW HUBERMAN: And it's great. And I believe it's great. So is there a compound effect
of believing it's great and it actually being great? LAYNE NORTON: Not in this study. So I think the
thing to point out, people will misinterpret that
as creatine doesn't work. And that's not what that says. What it says is, your
beliefs about what it does are probably just as
powerful as what it does. So they actually did a study-- and I don't have the
citation, but it was-- I think, within
the last 10 years where they told people
they were putting them on anabolic steroids. And wouldn't you know it,
they had better gains-- even though they weren't
actually on anabolic steroids, they had better gains than
people that they didn't tell were anabolic steroids. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Amazing. LAYNE NORTON: And that's
like hard outcomes. Strength, lean body mass,
those sorts of things. So when people say,
well, I wouldn't fall for the placebo
effect, it's like, you don't have to fall for it. If you believe it to be
true, the power of belief is very, very powerful. And as a scientist, I wish,
sometimes, I was ignorant so that I could subject
myself to the placebo effect more often. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
Yeah, absolutely. LAYNE NORTON: So
getting back to, that's just a possible
explanation of, maybe, why. And I'm the same way, like
I get done with a workout, like a resistance training
session, I'm like, I'm ready to eat. Now, if you look
at the literature overall on exercise
and appetite, it's not always
what you'd expect. Consistently, it seems to show
that exercise actually has an appetite suppressant effect. So people don't
tend to compensate at least fully for the
amount of movement they do. And there is some
evidence that-- you've probably heard
people say, well, exercise a really poor weight loss tool. If you figure out
how many calories you should be burning
from it and you do that, you end up getting less weight
loss that you would predict. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I have
a family member who is perfectly happy to eat less,
but doesn't loathe exercise, but dislikes exercise. And they're of healthy weight. But I'm always encouraging
them to exercise more. And so this is an ongoing battle
in our sibling relationship. LAYNE NORTON: Well,
one thing I would say is that, exercise
independent of anything that happens with your body
weight, you will be healthier. So exercise is one of the
only things that will actually improve your
biomarkers of health without even losing weight. So those-- it will improve
your insulin sensitivity, inflammation, all that stuff. So everybody out there looking
for a hack to be healthier exercises the hack, right? ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. Crucial point. And our mutual friend
Dr. Peter Attia, I think, has gone on record
several times now saying that of all the things
that one could take-- NMN, et cetera, metformin. Regardless of whether or not
one takes those or doesn't take those, that the positive
effects on longevity by way of biomarkers from
regular exercise is-- far outweighs all of
those things combined. Not that those things
don't necessarily work, we're not going through
them in detail now, but that exercise
is by far the best thing we can do for our
health span and lifespan. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. Absolutely. I 100% agree. And when you're talking
about weight loss, people miss the point
of exercise, I think. There's some work that came
out from Herman Pontzer as well that basically
showed like, well, if you do 100 calories
from exercise, you have a 28-calorie reduction
in your basal metabolic rate in response to that. So it's kind of like this
constrained energy expenditure model. But what I would say is, OK,
well there's still a net of 72. So it's still OK,
and the other thing is, I think the effects
of exercise on weight loss are actually more due to
what it does to appetite. So if you look at people who
lose weight and keep it off for a number of years,
kind of outliers because most people don't keep
it off for years, over 70% of them engage in
regular exercise. Of people who do not
keep weight loss, like maintain weight loss, less
than 30% exercise regularly. So now that's just
a correlation. That doesn't necessarily
prove causation. But there are some
pretty compelling studies showing that exercise
increases your sensitivity to satiety signals. So basically, you can have
the same satiety signals, but you're more sensitive
to them when you exercise. And there's actually
a really classic study from the 1950s in
Bengali workers where they looked at, basically,
four different quadrants of activity. So you had sedentary, lightly
active, moderately active, heavily active. Basically, based on
their job choice. And they didn't have
an intervention. They just wanted to track
them and see how many calories did they actually eat. So it was like a J-shaped curve. So the sedentary
actually ate more food than the lightly active
or moderately active. But from lightly active
to heavily active, they almost perfectly
compensated how many calories they should be eating. So to me, that suggests,
when you become active, you can actually regulate your
appetite appropriately or much more appropriately than
if you're sedentary. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
And do you think this has to do with
changes in the brain-- brain centers that
respond to satiety signals from the periphery,
and/or do you think it has to do with changes
in blood sugar regulation? What I was taught, and I
don't know if this is still considered true, is that
spikes in blood sugar will trigger a desire to
eat more even though it's kind of exactly the opposite
of what you need when you have a spike in blood sugar. And there's this
kind of-- and we'll get into this when we talk
about artificial sweeteners. This is the idea in mind. I think I adopted, perhaps,
falsely that you eat something that's sweeter, that
tastes really good, and you are suddenly on the
train of wanting to eat more. And I could imagine
how exercise, if it is increasing
the satiety signals, could be working a
number of different ways. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. I think it's-- I think the effect is probably
mostly at the brain level. The effects on blood sugar-- the research out there is not
very compelling for blood sugar driving appetite. Now, if you become hypoglycemic,
yes, you'll get hungry, but it's a different kind of
hunger than your normal like, I feel kind of empty and
my stomach's growling. Like those are--
they can go together, but usually like the
hypoglycemia is like, I am hot, I feel like I'm
going to pass out. You want to eat something not
because your stomach's growling but because that you
just need some fuel. ANDREW HUBERMAN: It's like
you're getting pulled under. LAYNE NORTON: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW HUBERMAN:
I've been there when I've done the longer
fasts, something I don't do anymore and
drink a lot of black coffee. There was probably an
electrolyte effect there because coffee as you excrete
sodium and other electrolytes. And then just feeling
like, I needed something. This whole thing
like I need something that's kind of desperation. I never want to be
back here again. Hypoglycemia is
very uncomfortable. LAYNE NORTON: It's not fun. So again, then when they look
at actual randomized controlled trials of implementing
some exercise where they're pretty
controlled environment, they typically see people-- if anything, they eat less
as opposed to eating more. Now, some people, again,
studies report averages. And there's individual
data points. So there are some people who
at least anecdotally report that exercise makes
them more hungry. That's completely valid. It could be their
beliefs around it, it could be a number
of different things, but it's important to
understand that there is individual variability. And I think one of
the things that I've learned to appreciate
more is not trying to separate
psychology and physiology. We do this a lot and say, well,
I want to know the physiology, I don't care about
the psychology of it. And now I'm kind of appreciating
more, psychology is physiology. Like with most things
now, we have kind of the biopsychosocial model. And I'll give you
an example of this. A lot of people get really
caught up with appetite. And if we could just
suppress people's appetite, that's part of it. But people don't just eat
because they're hungry, they eat for a lot of different
reasons, social reasons, especially. So can you remember the
last social event you ever went to that didn't have food? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: Right. If you look at dinner
plates from the 1800s, they're about this big. Now how big are dinner plates? ANDREW HUBERMAN:
The whole buffet. LAYNE NORTON: Right. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: There's
situational cues. You're sitting down to watch TV. Oh, grab some popcorn,
grab some snack, whatever. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I
even see this with-- you know, how one person
will pick up the phone and then everyone
picks up their phone. I think there's a
similar effect with food. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. And same thing, right? Like how many times have
we either done it ourselves or have been experienced
people saying, oh, you should have something--
you should have alcohol, especially, right? People-- I was hanging out
with somebody last night and I had a beer and
they just had a water. And I'm like, I feel no need
to try and convince them to do that with me. You know what I mean? But as humans,
we're hurt animals. We don't want to be
doing something out in isolation on our own. Now, this is a very tenuous,
I guess, belief of mine. But doing things
alone in isolation during ancestral
times, that's going to set off your alarm system. Because if you don't
have other people, you can't protect yourself. So typically, things were
done together in groups. And I think that's a
lot of the reason why we tend to be just tribal in
nature about a lot of things. So the whole point to that
is, on the list of reasons why people eat, I
mean, I've gotten to the point where I think that
hunger is actually not even the main reason people eat. Stress, lack of sleep-- ANDREW HUBERMAN: Boredom. LAYNE NORTON: --boredom. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Yeah. LAYNE NORTON: Absolutely. So unless we can
do something that addresses all those
things, there's a line from a review paper-- this review paper
came out in 2011 is by a researcher
named MacLean. And it's the best review
paper I've ever read. It was called, biology's
response to dieting-- the impetus for weight regain. And basically went
through all the mechanisms of these adaptations that
happen during fat loss diets and how biology's response
is to try to drive you back to your previous. And I'm going to
butcher the quote, but at the end of the
study he said, basically, the body's systems are
comprehensive, redundant, and well-focused on restoring
depleted energy reserves. And any attempt or any
strategy for weight loss that doesn't attempt to
address a broad spectrum of these things
is going to fail. And so that's why when people
say, well, just do low carb, you won't be hungry. Look, people don't just
eat because they're hungry. So I think really like
trying to get outside the box and think about these things. And especially, when you
read some of the literature, I recently read a systematic
review of successful weight loss maintainers, which I
thought was really interesting. So they took people who had lost
a significant amount of body weight and kept it off for,
I think, it was three years. And it basically asked
them questions and tried to identify commonalities. And there were
some things that I expected like cognitive
restraint, self monitoring, exercise. And then one of the
things they said that I found really fascinating
was pretty ubiquitous between people. They said, I had to
develop a new identity. So are you familiar
with Ethan Suplee? ANDREW HUBERMAN: No. LAYNE NORTON: So
Ethan is an actor. He's been in like remember the
Titans and American History X. ANDREW HUBERMAN: I certainly
saw American History X. LAYNE NORTON: Yeah. So he was very large. He was like 550 pounds. And now he's like
230 and jacked. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Well,
5-- he was how many-- LAYNE NORTON: 550 pounds. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Wow. LAYNE NORTON: And he
has-- whenever he puts up post on his Instagram of
him training, it'll say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him, is this
what you're talking about? Creating a new identity. And he said, this is exactly
what I'm talking about. Because I had to kill who I was. Because there was
no way I was going to be able to make long
term changes if I just didn't become a new person. Because I mean, and
addicts talk about this. Like people who are alcoholics. They had to get new friends. They had to hang out
at different places, because their entire
life had been set up around this lifestyle
for alcohol. And I would actually argue
that eating disorders or disordered eating patterns
is much harder to break than other forms of addiction. And you think about
food addiction. Well, in some ways, bulimia and
anorexia are still addictions. You can't stop eating. Like if you're alcoholic,
you can abstain from alcohol. If you become addicted
to say, cocaine, you can abstain from that. You can never abstain from food. And so now imagine
telling a gambling addict, well, you've got to play this
slot a couple of times a day but no more. Like that's really challenging. So yeah. I just-- like all
this stuff, it's so important to be comprehensive
with how we treat these things. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Right. These are incredibly
important points. And to my knowledge,
I don't think anyone has really described
it in a cohesive way the way that you're doing here. So important for people
to understand this because obviously,
as a neuroscientist, I think the nervous system
is creating our thoughts, our thoughts and feelings
are related to psychology, and therefore, of course, our
physiology and our psychology are one and the same. It's bidirectional. Now, nowadays, there's a lot
of interest in brain, body, and particular gut-- brain axis and we
can talk about that. But I really
appreciate that you're spelling out how there are
these different variables. Each one can account for a
number of different things. Exercise clearly has a
remarkably potent effect-- both during the exercise
in terms of caloric burn and overall health
and biomarkers. And then this is
wonderful to learn that it can increase the
sensitivity to satiety signals. I think that makes--
at least in my mind, places very high on the
list of things that people should absolutely do. But there are other factors too. And the identity
piece is fascinating. It reminds me also-- your
story reminds me also of David Goggins who is-- he talks about his former
very overweight self almost as if it was
a different person. And he uses language that
I'm not going to use here. But you know what? I've met David, know David
a bit, and his every bit is intense and driven as
and a remarkable human being as he appears
to be online. He is that guy. But it does seem like he
had to more or less kill off a former version of himself and
continues to do that every day. And I think what your point
about this other fellow who does it through a similar
process, the word "today" seems to really matter. It's not like you defeat this
former version of yourself and then that person
is buried and gone, you said, you know, I
killed my clone today, and that's the way that
David talks about it also. So this is a daily process. And I think this is not just a
small detail in time together all these things. I think that what
you are describing is fundamental,
because we can pull on each one of these
variables and talk about each one of them. But at the end of the day,
we are a cohesive whole as an individual. Sorry. You were about to say. LAYNE NORTON: That gets actually
into one of my favorite topics, which is, why do we have such
a hard time with losing weight but more so keeping it off? Because of obese people, six
out of every seven obese people will lose a significant amount
of body weight in their life. So why do we still have
an obesity problem? They don't keep it off. Why don't they keep it off? When you look at the
research, basically, what it suggests is
because people think about, I am going to do a diet, and
I'm going to lose this weight, and they do not give any thought
to what happens afterwards. It's like think about if you
have some chronic disease or a diabetic. You can't just take insulin
once and that's it, right? You've got to take it
continuously, otherwise, you're going to have problems. If you do a diet and you
lose 30 pounds, fantastic. But if you then just go
back to all your old habits, you're going to go back to
where you were, if not more. You can't create a new
version of yourself while dragging your old habits
and behaviors behind you. So what I'll tell people is-- because people say, well,
I'm doing a carnivore diet or I'm doing this
diet or that diet. And I'll say that's fine. Do you see yourself doing that
for the rest of your life? And if the answer is
yes, if you really believe that that's going
to be sustainable for you, and plenty of people, low carb,
intermittent fasting, whatever, they say, I felt easy. I could do this forever. Great. If you're going to lose weight,
you have to invoke some form of restriction-- whether it is
a nutrient restriction like low carb, low fat, a
time restriction-- intermittent fasting any form
of time restricted eating, or calorie restriction-- tracking macros, whatever. So you get to pick the
form of restriction. So pick the form
of restriction that feels the least restrictive
to you as an individual, and also do not
assume that it will feel the same for everybody else
because I made this mistake. Whereas it's like,
I track things. And so I allow myself to
eat a variety of foods, I allow myself to
eat some fun foods. But I track everything, and
I'm able to modify my body composition and be in
good health doing that. Now, doesn't feel hard for me. Part of it, I've just
been doing it for so long. But to other people,
that's very stressful. They don't want to-- they say, well, I'd rather
just not eat for 16 hours. If that feels easy for them,
do that because the one thing that-- there was a couple of
meta analysis on popular diets. And basically, what
they showed was they were all equally terrible
for long term weight loss. But when they stratified them
by adherence-- and none of them were better for
adherence overall. But when they
stratified people just according from lowest
adherence to best adherence, there it was a linear
effect on weight loss. So really what it
says is, what is the diet that's going to be
easiest for you to adhere to in the long term and you
should probably do that? And people-- again, this is
where I step back and take the 10,000-foot view. Somebody will say,
well, I'm going to do ketogenic because I want
to increase my fat oxidation and I want to do this. And they're talking about
all these mechanisms and everything. And that's great. Can you do it for the
rest of your life? Is this going to be something
sustainable for you? And if the answer
is, no, you probably need to rethink what your
approach is going to be. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Incredibly
important message. Basically, that. If I could highlight-- if there
was a version of highlight or boldface and underline
in the podcast space, I would highlight-- boldface and
underline what you just said. And for those of
you that heard it, listen to it twice,
and then go forward because it's absolutely key. I think it also explains a lot
of the so-called controversy that exists out there. I think it also crosses over
with the placebo effect. I almost want to say,
pick the nutrition plan that you think you can stick
to for a long period of time, ideally forever. And pick your placebo
too, because there is a lot of placebo
woven into each and every one of these things--
intermittent fasting, keto. Probably even vegan versus
omnivore versus carnivore. LAYNE NORTON: Well, they even
talk about the diet-- honeymoon period where you go into a
diet and you're all fired up about it and like
you're very adherent, and then what happens,
with every single diet without exception
in research studies is once you get past few
months, adherence just starts waiting and going off. ANDREW HUBERMAN: Here
we are really talking about a form of relationship. I'm not saying that
to be tongue in cheek. Actually, we had a guest early
on in the podcast, Dr. Karl Deisseroth, he's a psychiatrist
and a bioengineer at Stanford. Tremendously successful. Alaska award winner, et cetera. And he talked about love as a
sort of an interesting aspect of our psychology
where it's a story that you co-create with
somebody but that you live into the future of that story. When you pair up
with somebody that was referring to romantic
love, that there's this sort of mutual agreement
to create this idea that you're going to live into. So it's not just about how
you feel in the moment, it's also that you project
into the future quite a lot. I'm seeing a lot of
parallels with a highly functional and effective diet. And I love it. I'm not setting this
parallel up artificially, I'm setting up because I
think that ultimately it boils down to what you
said earlier, which is that the brain and our
decisions about what we are going to stick to are
tremendously powerful. LAYNE NORTON: I think one thing
I will say is keep in mind, when you look at the research
data, the meta analyzes on say, time-restricted eating versus
none, when calories are equated, doesn't seem to
be a difference in weight loss, fat loss, and most
biomarkers of health. Same thing for low
carb versus low fat. Fewer quick calories
and protein. There was a meta analysis done
by Kevin Hall back in 2017 where they looked at the-- and
again, actual loss of body fat. And another important
point was, I think there was 22 studies in this. But all of them provided
food to the participants That's important because
that ensures that adherence can be much higher
in those studies whereas various free
living studies, sometimes, you can see funky results. ANDREW HUBERMAN: People
are sneaking food or they're just not really-- LAYNE NORTON: It's
very difficult-- ANDREW HUBERMAN:
--eating the way that the study would
ideally have them eat. LAYNE NORTON:
Unless the person is getting like continuous
support-- like, studies where they
have a dietician talk to people like every
week tend to actually have pretty good adherence. I mean, that's expensive
to have done the study. And again, like what limits
studies, money, money, and money. But the low carb versus low
fat, protein, and calories are equated, basically,
no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get
upset about this. But it's like--
what to me, that's like-- this is great because you
get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it
doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one
that works for you. Whatever lever
you've got a pull, you've got a bunch
of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You
mentioned picking something that you can stic | protein, and calories are equated, basically, no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get upset about this. But it's like-- what to me, that's like-- this is great because you get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one that works for you. Whatever lever you've got a pull, you've got a bunch of different options. ANDREW HUBERMAN: You mentioned picking something that you can stic | 6 | 4 | 2 | protein, and calories are equated, basically, no difference in fat loss. Now, some people get upset about this. But it's like-- what to me, that's like-- this is great because you get to pick the tool you want. The one tool, it doesn't seem to be that much better than another. So pick the one that works for you. Whatever lever you've got a pull, you've got a bunch of different options. | You mentioned picking something that you can stick | 6,2,8 | 4,1,6 | 6 | 2 | 8 | 4 | 1 | 6 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGrk7Mzm4uo | 13,469 | WGrk7Mzm4uo | 2022-09-27 00:00:00 | I know all about YouTube analytics do you want me to help you with that I could use the help that's you yeah are you logged into the show's channel oh [ __ ] yeah hold on hold on hold on uh oh God that one was uh no the mile highs I was going to Antarctica a billion dollars if we could own the channel and the companies and stuff like that like that sounds enticing but but you've been offered a billion dollars for your YouTube channel with all the companies yeah what's different about the squid game video what did you tap into I I most spent like two million dollars on a video up to that point that one we spent 4.2 million that Sky up there is not real starting at the end of the blue is all CGI yeah all CGI and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president is that something you thought about it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just gave away every penny well there's literally zero dollars in my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing and then I just do what's best for people I like this yeah [Music] we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy good job your parents loved you when you're younger okay you don't no one's an elf did you just call me an elf it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice [Applause] should we fake your death he's trying to tear this whole thing apart like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga um like is there any steaks I said shakes or steaks what's up everybody and welcome to flagrant and today we are joined by Mr b6000 yeah it's funny because I don't have that name anymore wait why don't you have it did you abort it or something oh my God this is a great one uh yes welcome to flagrant I'm here because I had nothing better to do good that's the best reason to be here and uh and we're happy about it and we're just hoping that by the end of this episode I make the same amount of money as I did coming into the episode yeah I mean ideally but I'll just take the same fair enough you know we just don't lose a brand I mean you actually operate at a loss though based on your Rogan so we can do that oh yeah we can do that no problem that's true yeah but that's why if it dips it's a bigger loss you have the most brilliant way of saying that you make lots of money I agree but how no you say I make all this money and then you're like but I spend it all yeah but you still get to say that you make it yeah yeah so no one can really [ __ ] with you when it comes to making the money well I don't spend the money that's to you know for that reason but I guess that is true yeah if it does make it easier when people are like do you make a couple million a month like yeah because I just spend it all so it does make it exactly because if I did it if I was like oh yeah just make a couple million and that was the end then I just seemed like a douchebag exactly yes I do agree but I never really thought about it that way I did thank you you're like Adam Sandler in that way it's not like a multi-millionaire but you're like one of the guys still oh I like them like usually like really rich people you know we want to eat them yeah they buy speedsters and uh yeah and mansions and go on vacations to them all fees twice watches yeah and watches yeah yeah it's a replica right gambling degenerative are you one of the rich people they want to eat are you I'm not that rich not yet you are way more Rich than me uh but I I give my money away I'm poor yeah I give my money to my wife so what's your matter I feel like your fiscal policy is going to completely change once you get yeah yeah yeah yeah just giving away stuff all the time like yeah do more reaction videos from the kitchen yeah that's the reason is there a uh Mrs Beast there is we've only been dating like six months okay my boy how long have you been married don't do that it's media training yeah that was very good uh I've been married since the 18th of December no no December 18th I got married right decision really yes I recommend you do it and you don't need a place because you don't make any money okay did you get one did I get a prenup yeah she got me gonna regret that whatever something happens I know at least like three people who got one and I was friends with them when they got married and then like two of them you know didn't work out and every single one it's just interesting to see it go from like yeah we'll be together forever to like [ __ ] this is the worst decision of my life did you did you think about giving them some money uh because that'd be a great video this money yeah yeah just helping my friend who just got divorced tell you know the people at our food banks like less money this month gotta help my divorce they would actually get it they'd be like yeah they probably would he needs it he's probably waiting in line next to them yeah yeah is one of your friends that got divorced here uh no definitely not these 18 year olds no children Tara could have a child bride or something like that no not exactly sure [Laughter] um now you brought your son here bring your kids to work day yeah yeah now is that uncomfortable at all for you about to have my kids here yeah no and bring them back to work this is getting so uncomfortable we just wanted to give Carl a shout out we love Carl we're Big Carl fans here okay so you make millions and millions and millions of dollars who cares right yeah sure I make money because it's so much money you make just tons I don't know what to do with it you don't even know what to do with it no greed okay we don't I don't know okay but that's the fun thing yeah so it's just so much [ __ ] money okay and then you're giving it away constantly yep right and then More's coming in yeah and giving it away it's basically what I did like we I just had this Theory what well hopefully the Ponzi scheme never implodes got you like you know positive schemes are great up until they just go bust but no I had this idea when I was like 18 I was like when I made a couple thousand dollars a month I was like What if I just give it away and just try to make a little bit more than a couple thousand and then I just was like oh that worked and then I did it again yeah and I've done it every month ever since and I'm just like oh well it just works and it's like a couple Grand turned into 10 turned into 100 turn in a million it just keeps going up and I'm like oh now when when you ever did like the challenges where you're giving away to your guys if they win yeah were you ever worried that you would make them not really want to work that should be stimulus no no uh no especially when we were doing a lot they act different when they make like 150 grams yeah we're doing a lot of them hey they were like 10 grand or 20 grand and this was like Chris just left his job at Best Buy Tariq literally got I tried to hire Teri and he said no and then he went to work at a hospital then a year later he's like I'm depressed and I was like come on over most of them though like were just new and had like no money so like back then when they were fighting those challenges like that was like basically at the time so that's why uh but yeah you do see as time went on they didn't go as long the challenges and that's when obviously we transitioned to people like random people like at the start I wouldn't hook the boys up and then once they were good we're like okay let's start doing we can just start doing other people okay talk about hooking up uh when you're on Rogan you no no no you you brought up the fact that when you posted your first video it was when you got hacked playing uh Pirates battle pirates yeah whatever yeah have you found out who did it no I didn't but I should have they not reached out how would they Mr b6000 is their username right yes what are they gonna tweet me on Twitter like yeah you can do a YouTube video about it I'm Olivia's highest viewed video okay because because the story don't tell the story about like all of five people listening we're gonna [ __ ] the algorithm up already yeah you did [ __ ] your attention you know what um it's fine you know if you don't want this to your views that's up to you so um you're his son you're so true he starts this off with like oh by the way Joe Rogan got 10 million views and you know what goes through my head when he says I was like well it's completely up to the topics you bring up on whether or not we do it no I mean if this gets like a 40 minute retention we're passing that if this is like 25 minutes we're screwed yeah yeah so now we're down there okay so make this story I guess you know it gives a [ __ ] about a guy that hacked me when I was 11 years old on Facebook [ __ ] them our audience is actually uh older than 17. so why don't you go ahead they're insistent okay so when I was 11 I was playing the game a guy just started just destroying me absolutely crushing me every day he had to come through and attack my face and I got pissed so I made a video saying [ __ ] this guy although why there was no words I didn't know how to record audio I was stupid but it was just like him I just sent it to the devs and I uploaded it to YouTube and then it somehow got 20 000 views first video ever gets twenty thousand that's crazy because people who played the game would just watch it but they were trying to figure out how to hack and then like all the comments were like oh so there's a guy out there that's responsible for you posting on YouTube yeah for making pissing me off when I was 11 and then inadvertently making me make a video and he could be listening right now what do you want to say to that guy um thanks for making me Rich he needs a royalty name something I found out who he is would you break him off with a little something yeah of course I give him a couple thousand dollars what do you mean couple thousand that's at least a million right yeah no get him on it dude [ __ ] that guy oh you want to play Pirates now watch this that's a great question when when you're buried alive like do you guys ever think about like him being mean as a boss oh tell them your plan for if you die oh yeah they want me to die oh yeah 100 great video big time they do because the second I died yeah um Carl Chandler Chris the three guys Nolan maybe he's a little newer we haven't decided if he partakes yet or not yeah uh they all put their hand in my Tombstone last take it off gets the channel Everything 100 everything oh what about it dude you just left the brown guy out of this he's not on care he's the camera guy so like most people haven't seen him I mean I don't know what do you think Tariq gets to put his hand on the tombstone yes I think so as of right now it's just written in the like little plan it's just those three we have to update it and put Nolan and maybe Tariq in it yes it's like because we have a little gameplay so you know they can film the video yeah that is happening mark my words I don't even know if I've really said it publicly I tweeted it one time but I'm serious I don't give a [ __ ] how much you guys are cry right put their [ __ ] hands on the tombstone and give the channel to whoever wins okay and don't bully them for it they're just doing what I want and and you guys think you could do without him right like an interesting experiment I'm down should we fake your death dude oh [ __ ] no just like I want to do this the next 10 years and if I do that then like if I fake that did I pick count to 100 000. good point good point you can't take anything okay uh hold on real quick real quick most illegal go for it no uh most illegal video honestly I try to brainstorm legal videos so yeah that's probably a better use of your time okay um what about what about like a competition like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay is that the notepad you're flipping yeah yeah yeah yeah go ahead rip it up three that I for the podcast he's just slide through okay um this is a good tell me if you think this has good one retention and good like uh click through okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga that could work um like is there any steaks say again like anything on the line uh I said shakes or steaks I just got Invisalign all right my s's are not gonna come off correctly like maybe if it's like losers car gets hit by a meteor or something that's a good one that's good I like that okay oh okay wait a hundred kids go to an island last one leaves gets an internship with Jeffrey Epstein thoughts right he's dead or is he I haven't seen the body um yeah it's a banger that's right I don't know but yeah for the right reasons but you know get clicks it's probably by the FBI okay you were investigated by the FBI was that well that's what we're wondering oh no I was hunted by them for a video were they really hunting someone else in your crew you want to inform me do you know something I don't I think we know who he's looking at I don't know he's looking at Carl I was looking at Carl I was looking at Carl's dad and nobody else hey hey bro I'm gonna need you to respect Tariq yeah I do okay all right I'm gonna have to walk up yeah yeah you respect to people were spectators one trillion dollars I give you right now uh okay I have to spend it on the video okay what is it uh I bought everything I wanted in life and I just buy everything everything I don't think I get you to a trillion dog I'm gonna be honest now humans are expensive bro like oh I can figure it out people are like you couldn't spend a billion a day if you wanted to [ __ ] 10 super Yachts problem solved I could I could spend a trillion okay I'm just calling up like people who own neighborhoods buying entire neighborhoods you know wow I could figure it out one trillion you buy everything you want in life yeah I would just literally buy like half of America why not have you look into buying a planet uh uh no I mean like they're so far away you know how much cooler it is if planets weren't like 500 000 light years away there's like a realistic way we could visit them in our life yeah I feel like we'd all be way happier yeah yeah we'll just get out of here for a little bit it won't just stress Our Lives it's more fun yeah yeah but it's like you have to like build a ship and send it off and people have to have kids on it and kids and their kids will maybe see that planet it's kind of lame yeah yeah thing I mean that's what your boy's trying to do at least yeah Elon yeah yeah my boy did you believe him when he made that offer what offer if something bad happens to him oh on Twitter I love dude you did your research you think that you're gonna come on this bro my journalistic Integrity oh yeah he thinks he's a journalist but I'm a journalist bro really yeah well then you need to make up some lies that sounds good yeah yeah well first he has to buy it and then yeah I'm very confident if he bought it and died he'd give it to me totally and not the ambassadors that have tens of billions of dollars in it hmm that's a bad enemy to make though I wouldn't have made that deal with you what that oh if I I own Twitter if I die if I die then you get it the guy that is making videos and doing crazy could you imagine someone assassinates him but then like the holy motive I wonder who it could be okay and then they just want to assassinate him yeah they get a [ __ ] YouTube channel but what would you even do with Twitter I mean I don't know sell it's worth a lot of money Give It Away give it give it to a subscribers get some money oh no you stop being poor help him okay because he doesn't need help he he doesn't believe in philanthropy oh no I do believe no no you don't believe in places we've talked about this word on the streets you hate plenty I don't hate it I believe in it um what do you donate to say again we've talked about this a million I donated to Catholic Church I donated sperm for like the first maybe like no it's not three years [Laughter] I believe in philanthropy you've literally never done it I do believe in it he believes in it as an idea he just hasn't gotten around to it no I think I believe when you do it I think you do it yeah yeah wait I believe it you believe him I believe people do it what do you mean I don't know can I believe it and also not do it look I'm saying Jimmy donates millions of dollars every year he plants trees yeah he helps people yes food pantries yeah and you also have a lump of money yeah that you could use to help other people and why don't you um I I feel like you're doing a good job like if everybody what if I have a burger and I have chocolate and I'm giving everybody money and I'm giving everybody Islands you know what I mean your changes how many [ __ ] white oprahs do we need there we go I should give more man yeah agreed why why when did you start giving when I was like 15. oh you started young yeah that's the problem The Habit has been built yeah yeah exactly we're too old to start we got money ladies yeah yeah perfectly logical reason more importantly yeah everyone always talks about obviously you yo yo yo can you stop bullying us no He's a Bully but I love it this guy's a bully dude yeah yeah bro you're a [ __ ] on his side well I'm just saying I didn't realize son of a [ __ ] did you realize he's taller than you two he's the bullet everyone how tall are you wow all right okay your Netflix special that you you know sold on your own and you made more than they would have paid you yeah have you ever was with Netflix but yeah yeah have you ever like said how much money was publicly or anything like that no I haven't do you ever plan on it just every time I hear it I'm always curious like even on the car right over I like was thinking about I was like uh just how much did you [ __ ] on Netflix you know well this guy's good it's not I didn't say it was Netflix Oh wait really yeah I thought that was the whole thing everybody found it was Netflix I never said which one it is he's never revealed that bro I was beyond certain it was Netflix I don't [ __ ] know because he looks at the stock market Netflix is like here's a three million bang yeah delete some jokes and you're like [ __ ] you and then you made like 20 million and you just shat on them I didn't make 20 million yeah obviously that was just the number I put on my head but yeah what's happening yeah if I want bro do you plan on telling us how badly you should on said streaming service I I plan on just taking a moment [ __ ] an [ __ ] dude you just threw out 20 like it was nothing bro I apologize yeah I'm gonna talk [ __ ] man that's it now I'm putting it on YouTube because you said that what the number I'm gonna put the whole special on YouTube there and he's gonna donate his money and I'm gonna donate the money hold on to it hold on to it I'm gonna donate to who you said I'm gonna donate it to me and my wife I'm gonna donate to us and then when you get a divorce you'll get half of it [ __ ] [Laughter] [Laughter] any other [ __ ] questions no but I want that story we were talking about beforehand yeah about the yeah so when he was uh going through video ideas it reminded me of someone who just I can't remember if it was Dubai or somewhere in the Middle East this guy hired a private investigator in North Carolina I have no context to find me um and this is just something that happens yeah someone this happens a lot so whenever people call local private investigators they just let us know because a lot of people just want to know where I am for whatever reason oh the private investigators call you directly yeah it's usually which now I'm giving away my secrets but oh well I'm In Too Deep but yeah um so he calls us lets us know he's like this time it's someone from like Dubai we don't really know what he wants but he's just flying to North Carolina tomorrow and he just paid me to find you and we're like okay cool um and so then the next day he gets there and then with the private I have security somebody's security woman to private investigator to meet him and my Security's just like why the [ __ ] are you here why are you trying to find Jimmy and the guy's like I just have video ideas I really want to give them and my security is like [ __ ] you why are you actually here he's he just kept saying it like 30 times in a row he's just like I just want to give him the sheet of ideas so it's just a piece of paper with video ideas flies across the world private investigator everything instead of like we don't believe you and so they like he let them my security search his hotel room couldn't find anything nothing in there just a suitcase of clothes um and he's just literally just did all that to give me a list of ideas and then and then well my security was like oh Jimmy's out of town for three months did you ever get the [ __ ] yeah well then just get took it I was like I'll give it to Jimmy and then he gave it to me and it was just like it was like open up a free gas station like open that's actually that's a very Middle Eastern idea yeah he's trying to make money off you it was like 30 ideas like that and I was just like this is actually a lot of women read in public or something like that we we did get squid game out of that [ __ ] yeah [ __ ] I sold a guy from Dubai's idea this is before the real squid game that's the game yeah no he wrote it all out yeah this guy just hired private investigators flew down there all this muddy camped out just to give me a list of video ideas and none of them were good none of them were good I got I got plenty of ideas yeah yeah I need ideas give me the Dubai ideas it's much easier to fly here at the North Carolina do you have a lot of people uh doing that like uh just okay you hear the stories of people going like I risk everything to be here like I saw Carl's story of like I spent my last dollar and then I ended up working out and that kind of inspires every lunatic to take their last dollar yeah to just show up I just I live in my studio now yeah so it's like fin stand and stuff that's and most people know that so they don't but sometimes you know the gym in the bedroom but sometimes I'll go out and they'll just be like yeah this guy's just been camping behind a gas station for like a month waiting to see you and I'm like lovely and how do you say I just like tell him I'm just not interested like that's not how you know I like to meet people but that's still like occasionally happens and it's always like that never pissed them off because you're not like I mean that's not the nicest I'm not I don't think anyone expects me to just go and be people who just can't battle wait for my attention because you don't know like they might be trying to kill me they might be whatever yeah so it used to be it's weird I like hostiles sometimes it's like a lot and then sometimes it's not as much yeah have you ever had a dangerous moment like with your security where they had to intervene and like get someone off you um dangerous car can you think of one uh not really no nobody cares enough yeah you know Baxter's ever a crowd of five people is it ever women waiting to see okay Mr Beast no I usually um no but we've never had any like crazy issues it's actually kind of weird like with the mall one like that went really well even though like crazy yeah at one point there's like 20 000 people in there yeah and girls showing tits and [ __ ] these are jokes these are videos these are children really they're screenshots in the video of like of girls like flashing I hope not yeah no that was nuts it was crazy yeah and they had like the the American flag like pasties or whatever like that this is not true you didn't see this it's on it's there was a whole quibby series that they made about is that what it was nope turn the phone when within five seconds of using quibby I want to watch the show and I was like this is garbage I went to screenshot and the screenshot was black yeah and that's how I knew it would fail because you can't make memes they made it where you couldn't take screenshots of anything Netflix's problem too yeah well at least Netflix like you can watch it on your computer and it's easier to screenshot yeah clivia was phone only and there's zero way to take a screenshot okay so it's like how the [ __ ] do you expect these shows to go viral yeah like that was the same time of baby Yoda and all this stuff and then quibby's just like no no memes yeah and it's like no one's ripping your [ __ ] shows can you explain that a little bit more about how like memes Drive the culture of 100 yeah like the Mandalorian you get rid of baby Yoda memes it's like nobody even talks about it exactly I I never would watch it now when you're creating videos here you also going like what do you think will be memeable in this uh I probably should but no but no yeah right now I'm just film and TV like film TV it's what is memeable no not only it's just it's just something that happens naturally if you're just kidding or no one can take screenshots and you're just an idiot you know I mean because that's how you just get attention on Twitter it's like cutting one of your legs out for money yeah if you try to make a meme then your cringe like memes just happen yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you mean like if you're the creator of the TV show like The House of dragons is going this is the memeable moment exactly you I don't think you can ever do that you can't force them you can embrace it though after it's like organically possible lean in yeah yeah I think you have to yeah that like what is that movie morbius or whatever yeah movie that got absolutely destroyed yeah did you see there but it still did well right I don't know I'm pretty sure like the destroying it caused it to they put it back out in theaters oh really it went viral as like a meme and they're like we're re-releasing it opinion says well with the like people actually I was enjoyed though yeah you did that you did yeah we did we bought every ticket in a theater and then we just flooded with people in suits oh it's amazing it's great and I heard they made that [ __ ] illegal yeah like they did a few places yeah it's like for the first seven three years I go to a movie theater and then like three days later it's like no you can't do that also like uh the most mature way to dress yeah right yeah it has a very cultish feel to it though just a bunch of young white kids in suits and whatever yo yeah this is scary you're saying if there's like a bunch of white people all dressed the same you would like to make you feel uncomfortable a little bit I wonder if I walked in and it was just a hundred black people in suits how I would feel yeah Men In Black because I think the New Mexico Studios what's going on yeah that is wild I don't know why that is concerning it shouldn't be illegal but it does make you literally because some of them started lighting firecrackers in the movie theater and one of them like blew up a couple seats I told you man it's a dangerous thing you can't trust that many white people just the same why we get out of it we get out of hand you get yeah you get one group thinking it's just a it's just a mob also yeah yeah but it is fun see me and then we break it up so it's not too much white boy [ __ ] going on yeah yeah so every time Mark and I are starting to get hyped about things yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not good that's actually a really good idea that's why fatic is a part of the team so that's it gotcha too much fun he's not good we keep his camera off he's like Sid Vicious we don't even use it yeah you're content made it but just in case you guys start going you want to go to Charlottesville he's like everybody chill out this is very important that's how you build your team oh that's smart Teresa Foundation right yes okay this is good are they allowed to have girlfriends is the team allowed to have girlfriends I wish not but you know if they want to are they just drowning in strange or what oh my gosh let's cut over time boy [Laughter] dude okay girl I didn't know you had it like that my voice [Music] [Laughter] Nola's got a little something going on I know 100 right chain out by the way yeah oh I love it some wild [ __ ] boys you got over here oh [ __ ] crazy again what are you guys do on a Saturday like split a six-pack of white claws dude all right well I don't I just work all the time yeah yeah so I usually see them when we're filming but outside that I don't see them too much anymore okay how do you split the work balance with your girl you've introduced this relationship in last time yeah that's what US married guys want to know yeah I got you guys the answers you've been needing she's actually from South Africa so she can only come here 90 days a year anyways so it just naturally Works itself out [Music] African-American uh I'm working on it a white woman and African-American oh there's your video wedding episode it is a little weird that like like she makes good money she's like gone to college multiple degrees everything you would want you would want her here yeah but I still feel like there's just literally no way to get her in America like you why don't we like reform our immigration process we're like yeah we should let in the good ones right who said that why are you making it bad why are you making it bad you're twisting I don't want my girlfriend you've been doing this to him for an hour okay um but you can marry her and then she's in yeah I'll just marry her yeah that seems like a reasonable way you could actually have Nolan do it no one could marry your guy it would be a great video is that like a company could I just pay someone to marry her yeah yeah really is that like it's not a company but no one can do it are you thinking about I don't know what like if she has to marry someone I see on it you know this is a little bit but if it doesn't do anything but it feels just like some guy that I'll never see again and they just like marry so she can move here like but he might try something no no one's an elf look at that like he's not gonna do anything yeah but the problem is no one will make fun of me but the thing is because there's a lot of the Rings call me an elf yeah [Music] it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice it's a compliment cookies in a tree that's what he's saying no Lord of the Rings bro I've seen Lord of the Rings I just don't know what I look like you know the people that you're like my family no no not your ears your [ __ ] head and your skin and your yes your beauty [Laughter] married to my girlfriend maybe he's not doing nothing yeah but he's got that over himself no he doesn't win a single argument anymore that's it why what happened because I'm married to your girlfriend but then you can also look at that do you know who that is Legolas yes yeah yeah yeah [Laughter] wait what else do we got in here yeah yeah yeah I was surprised you're not grabbing your phone back wait you're gonna let him look him look at your photos yeah yeah yeah it can't happen no yeah okay you you guys should trade phones that'd be fun oh me and you yeah do you want to do that ah I feel like he's just gonna like go through my YouTube analytics and start blurting out numbers well I maybe that's actually a great idea actually probably he wasn't good do you want me to help you with that I I could use the help that'd be great I mean we could work on some TMS are you the behind the scenes guy no it's all it's awesome [Laughter] yeah are you logged into the show's channel yeah what are we doing right now wait hold on hold on hold on what are we doing here we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy bro no you're killing it crazy guys he's a good job I keep up the good work you know what I will not compliment you the rest yeah he's gonna give you advice and then you're gonna give him your parents loved you and you're younger you don't know someone abused this man and he just doesn't know how to take us off I'm proud of you for having two million subscribers wow and he's like what the [ __ ] did you just say I was like I'm proud wow okay Solomon over here bro yeah you could tell the accuracy by how fast we both did Jesus Christ my Dad loved me at least you know hey Mom still stepped it up a little bit so it's RPM's a little how do we get that up yeah yeah what'd he say RPM RPMs yeah I've been working on those yeah yeah you definitely I love the RPM so you swear a lot in the video say again you swear a lot in the videos I I wouldn't no you did I could tell you dude just look at the revenue I don't swear you have to I don't swear it wouldn't be this love you didn't swear racist a lot but that's not cussing gotcha do you know what I mean yeah a substitute like you know oh you're saying say things that are wrong yeah you say things that you know advertisers naughty yes but we have great advertisers the numbers it's just funny that like I could never looking for a chocolate bar sponsorship actually can we sponsor the next one yeah how do you charge an episode for you yeah free oh philanthropy thank you yeah you almost said Felicia it's only one other time okay palette of chocolate right there matter of fact we need to replace the trees we will replace it with a paddle of chocolate matter of fact matter of fact I've been wanting to try your burger let's see how fast are the Beast Burgers usually come go Mark uh uh probably 30 minutes 30 minutes well we might get them a little quicker uh what are they here is it only hamburgers or do you have anything for people who aren't going uh yeah he doesn't eat beef we have a grilled cheese oh that sounds fun I'm working on oh no we have impossible meat as well okay I forgot we launched that it's just like three percent of our sales like no one gives a [ __ ] I was like really expecting people to [ __ ] with the plant-based first we were friends you know what I mean I thought we had a thing and we just [ __ ] on him together no what this that's nothing it's just in general America just doesn't give a [ __ ] thank you yeah because I was like really hoping that would like explode and like no one cared about the impossible me yeah and we also did like lettuce wraps where you can substitute the bun for a letter that sounds great like that yeah that sounds fun when people want a burger they want a burger that's what I found out the hardware what's up guys today's episode is sponsored by surf shark surf shark is a modern VPN design with the user in mind their utilities are powered by a robust security mechanism but designed to be simple intuitive to use enjoy all the freedoms of an open internet safely and 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back to the show look at this how long have these been sitting around hold on one second because if they say these are bad it's not my fault no we got some real Beast Burgers okay this is it Mr Beast that old ass packaging oh oh God here we go wait a minute okay this is weird that looks awful like a Big Mac s Special Sauce it looks like a Big Mac dude I mean when you order we order from McDonald's cheese lettuce onions oh what is this it looked like two old beef patties mustard sauce pickles cheese lettuce I just thought it says hasn't been opened yeah so this is a Big Mac then you guys really move it off how are you going to use my card and not get an impossible Burger you can eat beef why not oh I mean it's impossible this is a beast Burger this is what happens when you hang out with comedian yes okay so these do look like Big Mac so that is a big mac oh that is yeah oh so that's what the Beast burger no you can't help your [ __ ] you but no don't know what's going on let me see this he uses ghost kitchens right oh this one though that looks more like her that's what hold on let me okay that's it hold on hold on hold on dude do you have like a do you have like a team that we could call like an HR son that's crazy because we didn't do that you did no we did not swear there's not a coincidence that the ones without the stickers are Big Macs and the ones with the stickers not opened aren't [Laughter] yeah it looks like it's been centered around a little bit but it looks good I'm gonna take a bite right now it's not my fault if it's been sitting out for an hour is there money in there oh no I'm not gonna lie I have fire it's got fries on it um that's bar hey that's Chandler so whoever's on our marketing team make an ad of him saying that and just run it all over that's fine just Target everyone within 100 mile radius of this or anyone that goes to a show just hit him with Instagram ads if I'm going that's far I think that's [ __ ] fire right there what do you rate that one out of ten burger burger review honestly down down honestly no not honestly guys while you're ready I'm honest with you right now this needs a little more sauce okay probably because it's been sitting around a little bit it's dried up oh yeah you this this the version they ordered is the one with no sauce well you don't need to throw it like that that's the old factory they need to update it they need to update that [ __ ] yeah agree [ __ ] that package agreed what's wrong with Angry Birds Packaging Patty yeah excellent I agree Patty is excellent dare I say the best you've ever had for fast food okay dude I'm an in and out Enthusiast I feel the return retention you know just give us the rating so we can love it holy [ __ ] that's reduction step it up bro miles the single please one out of ten all right you know what I'll take it if it saves the podcast it's just hardwired you can't spend a decade of your life studying how to go violent how to get people to watch the video and then have it fire bomb in front of your eyes to not like hurt your soul yeah so you think about that with everything yeah it'd be like the same as if I started doing stand up there and it was just god-awful you would be like I gotta like what about during sex do you ever be like oh my God I'm starting to look around the room a little bit like Africa would be nice to be back right now it's been more than three minutes I think we got enough RPMs so is there a collab burger or food product that we the flagrant Beast products yeah I know [Music] [Laughter] [Laughter] so Jimmy gave you some advice on your channel we'll suck less yeah um what is uh what's your advice for his channel oh number one uh plane crash video very close to 911. I intentionally made sure we did not upload in September they were like you know we might need more time I was like you don't have more time [Applause] I was like this is like we're a couple days away from September like that's so funny it's like no one gives you advice on your channel so this is gonna be a perfect tons of advice every time I upload I get like 40 phone calls from people tell me how it could be about it is there somebody you watch that you still learn a lot from on YouTube that you're like oh that guy I could learn from uh I mean everyone like even like anybody more than anyone else anybody no it changes it's just like I just like watching random Youtube videos and like even like a homeless person on the street you can learn something from like how to be more humble or what what it's like for someone who's struggling so like if you apply that same mindset to videos like every video you watch there's something you can learn especially if it has a million views like there's a reason it got a million views okay I could give you the dumb dick joke answer Alex didn't believe that you got buried oh you didn't no interesting he had a whole reason for why you didn't get buried I kind of forgot you don't just forget yourself this is the most viewed video You're questioning my existence yeah exactly I'm just saying the camera angles made it seem as though oh I could have fixed it I remember this whoa I know and I think you're you're worth too much to take that risk uh yeah my mom was like crying when I filmed this video I was like Mom I promise we did the math um let me skip to over here to show you there's a scene where the boys literally dig down and yeah see that penis sign yeah they literally dug down and put that there yeah uh so you you could have planned wait wait right here oh Carl wait wait for the cut right here look you can literally see where they put the sign there and how deep it is underground or that could have just been shot at a different time where whoa Carl is on to us what if like to Arena like Brandon here it was like hey Jimmy I need you really uncomfortable yeah okay with this video specifically okay yeah um well there's two I'm curious about for the same reason this the one where you're in the the outdoor pool and you're under underwater yeah the thing bro that was done like five years ago this yeah the headache yeah have you figured out what that was about yeah it's because uh I was an idiot back then in the like we were pumping air in but the CO2 or whatever the [ __ ] you it doesn't get pumped out yeah getting pumped out yeah so you're just inhaling your own carbon yeah and so then when I started getting a headache I was like oh [ __ ] and then dioxide yeah yeah carbon dioxide so then we like called someone who know what they're doing they're like yeah you're an idiot yeah yeah okay and I just got out immediately okay and then when you're buried under this is what we learned from it so we had a pump that was pumping in air and pumping out the old Air what was the most catastrophic thought you had while you were completely buried I uh tried there was a camera at my feet three could also talk about this too uh and I went to like go adjust it and I couldn't so I like literally turned around and I'm you know not super flexible so I literally like was going to turn and so like I'm laying like this and as I'm like Disney I got caught like halfway and I was like [ __ ] I'm [ __ ] I'm fine I was literally like guys if I can't get out of this in two seconds you start digging right the [ __ ] now because I was like cotton is super awkward position like in the thing and I just like I'm gonna give it one last try and I just pushed as hard as I could and I popped out the other end and then I adjusted the camera and then you had to get back exactly because have my because it's like the thing got Slimmer this way yeah it was so uncomfortable on that side yeah so then I had to do it again and I almost got stuck again like what was going through your head when you were watching it Mike this was the first time he like panicked during the whole situation yeah we got really scared no did you calculate how much time it would take to excavate yeah they knew that because uh I mean it was like they could get me out in under five minutes if I really needed to be I okay I started practicing with my hand on the tombstone [Laughter] I see you this feels good it feels real good yeah so any of these other ones up here you think are fake no I just thought that one I think you counting to 100. he set his sights on you he's about to start [ __ ] on you well he's like I think your [ __ ] shoes are fake or fake easy so subreddits would go crazy exposing me and I just didn't care and I thought it was the funniest thing ever that's so smart and then I wore a fake Supreme shirt in a video same thing Reddit just lost their mind and I just I just love doing it to piss him off I mean it also keeps you in the conversation even more though no it's just funny to like watch them analyze the box logo and why it's not real you also save money you don't have to buy that's true yeah I'm still terrified about this buried alive dude I'm I'm severely claustrophobic wow oh yeah severely close so the nights before I slept in a coffin in my garage to like oh you get used here yeah emo phase too so you put a little effort in so there's just this coffin in my cold ass garage and I just lay in it close it chill there for a couple hours do you like consult with people about this first that one David Blaine yeah interesting because he did a week so I was gonna do 24 hours Bear live and then I called David and I was like I'm gonna bury myself for 24 hours and he's like that's it and I said all right I'm doing it for 50 hours and that's why it's 50 hours instead of 24. yeah but did you see his dumbass balloon thing who is he to judge I mean that's pretty cool whatever the balloon oh he just flew in a balloon it was like upper he held on to balloons flew up and then popped him came down yeah it was pretty cool but yeah that's so I I had to double it because he just basically Shadow my entire existence I mean we would have been fine if you did 24 hours just the Buried Alive thing like what is the the oxygen tank malfunctioned I couldn't handle being stuck in an elevator for 24 seconds there's enough oxygen in there for five minutes yeah I guess you're right we had so we buried that cop in like five separate times we had you know David Blaine Consulting a bunch of other people Consulting I was probably safer under there than I was above ground I think that's what they told me yeah yeah I don't know if that's true the dirt on the glass and you realize it's like this much glass between you and just thousands of pounds of dirt then it's like well [ __ ] oh that's right if it eats a little bit of a crack did you hear any weird sounds so terrified I'm sure I heard tons of stuff oh but we tried to keep it upbeat and not like I was super scared so like in the video I don't think we really put that kind of stuff did that help you get less scared knowing so many people are watching if you get scared it's kind of embarrassing whatever so that kind of blocks out that no that whole time I was just like for the love of God don't crack like because all I did was stare up at that dirt and so I just saw six thousand ten thousand whatever thousand pounds of dirt the whole time for like 50 hours straight and it hurts like [ __ ] like the bottom is just wood so you're just like that in of itself is a gem like you're just like laying on wood it was it wasn't fun but you know 194 million views not that bad I would do it again yeah what was the worst one to do the one you would never do again um that's a great way let me flip through these no buried alive I do again a heartbeat that wasn't like in the grand scheme of things it wasn't too crazy uh 50 hours in solitary you can find me don't seem that bad no well after you're married that seems like a kind of a vacation yeah now you have the [ __ ] Goofy Goobers over here torturing you and they won't let me sleep or do anything uh okay no Carl what's the hard one there's what I I say all the time but I'm just drawing blank well it's not counted before I was nice maybe yes I spent 25 hours a night that was miserable I you couldn't pay me to do that anymore what do you mean we just built a house that ice and I just spent 24 hours in it were you wearing something they would like pants like this and like a short sleeve shirt it was brutal I was like shivering all night it was one of those ones like 10 hours in I was like I'm too invested to quit but currently wouldn't do it that was like Peak grind me where I was like you know I'll do things as long as you know I'm not putting my life in danger like which we had man that's the widest thing you've done really love not being cold it's like a thing I've noticed is why people walk around yeah yeah let's go yeah that that's your whitest sitting in ice for 24 hours yeah yeah that was fruit how many views did they get uh like 100 million it kind of flopped I'm just kidding what is a flop for you now um if a video doesn't get like 50 million views it kind of sucks so but that's in English and then we dub them in other languages I love this yeah have you seen the Espanol Channel yeah yeah you should do that we yeah yeah so that one's been crushing we just hit 20 million you know what's weird is I bet people already were doing that for your videos yeah they were especially in like Japan for some reason yeah people used to upload their videos like crazy and they get millions of views yeah yeah so then that's why we just started doing it but the way that you guys do it is smart where you get the actors that are known the exactly well there's a huge secondary market for Mr Beast videos so like we'd come up with an original idea whatever like I don't know press this button 100 Grand and then the next day you'd see people on Spanish-speaking communities Japan Russia all over the world do the exact same video so part of this as well like everyone would just rip off our videos around the world because that was like a huge strategy like people at all these countries or just see who can copy our English videos first in their country and now that we do this like the rate of that has decreased a lot wow I wonder fake Supreme t-shirt exactly yeah exactly if people do that with our stand-up oh 100 they do There's a comic I'll leave his name out but um it was like huge in France and apparently he was just using Seinfeld's material I'm talking about oh but I'll tell you after I think he was just like using Seinfeld's material and then they became friends really yeah because Seinfeld is such a [ __ ] Maniac he was like this guy's got great taste like if he's gonna if he's gonna steal something he steals from the best and then they became buddies but he was like a huge comic there how crazy is that I've never heard Seinfeld I love Utah no no no I love you dude yeah that's the best thing you've said on this whole podcast do you know who he is even well I know because you got Tariq talks about comedians all the time yeah but but you but whatever right no he's a non-factor right like explain like to me like like a non I'm pretty he's in um he has a show that's that's on no no but no no he does I know you're [ __ ] with me you don't know how much you hate Seinfeld yeah yeah yeah I don't hate him but I just think he's whatever but the fact that the fact that you don't even know keep going about this like talk me through this like what are you feeling about emotionally retention through the roof right now this is going okay guys just like Drake talks about him and that's about it but he has a show or like what is this thing like isn't it I think I'm gonna sound dumb isn't it like Better Call Saul or something like that or no yes yes what is wait the show is Seinfeld yeah okay gotcha but that's okay his show is actually called Breaking Bad yeah yeah yeah yeah but go on go on go on but yeah okay yeah no Andrew I need you to ask him about movies he's never seen an entire movie in his one movie in his entire life I grew up on YouTube this guy's never seen movies yeah it was because he was homeschooled this was different with you right uh yeah no I just thought it was waste did you have chickenpox as a kid oh my gosh probably you just had shingles like a couple months ago so that means shingles means you've had chickenpox oh yeah it's the same virus though yeah yeah so there you go yes Mark just had chickenpox at the ripe age of 25 years old who are you to talk what are you talking about a compromised immune system I know same same way oh really no it's Crohn's oh you got Crohn's yeah can you eat your Burgers uh yeah those are fine it's mostly just I don't know I'm just so heavily medicated it's like in remission right now but if I wasn't on medicine it would be different oh what type of meds uh Remicade not that anyone knows what that is you ever do a Remicade at a party one time no but if you ever tried a Tesla ecstasy pill because that's [ __ ] amazing are you public about doing drugs dude love them literally I was like yeah I'm on my way over he's like is it like an X that's what is it ecstasy Etsy that's where people make [ __ ] you drugs yeah I'm a Christian boy I don't do drugs he's like okay okay I didn't know if you were [ __ ] with me or not because like you'd also like he's going back and forth with like being very sarcastic and then like very serious in the text so I have no [ __ ] we've never spoken on the phone before at all and like so we're on the phone we're on the group text with Tariq and he's like listen we need to kick Tariq out of the room immediately after he comes here I go okay that's fine and then he messaged me on the side he goes I would like to talk to you privately but the joke was that Tariq just loves you guys and so I was all that stupid [ __ ] I was saying and there was to embarrass him because he is he cringing in the back of the car and I remember so I just say some dumb [ __ ] to you like yeah I don't [ __ ] care or whatever and then I just looked back and he's just like hey hey you're a good guy dude Tark you're a good guy hey thank you and we're gonna pronounce your name right every single time yeah okay appreciate it guys appreciate it 100 you are a good Christian boy though is it true that your old YouTube Banner used to be like a Bible verse it did I used to go to a Christian School back in the day oh yeah but now it's like it's just kind of hard to tell what's right or what's wrong like religion wise there's so many and I don't know I believe there is some kind of God but how do you know damn Mark just got so sorry right [Laughter] because he's such a [ __ ] Catholic oh is that why you donate to the Catholic Church yeah yeah he bullish you no he calls that my paycheck that's what it is yeah yeah he gives me money hey I have his Revenue up here I mean he could probably make some more donations I think so donations right but for so so have your feelings changed since tark's been around or like has he are you expanding the caliph oh my gosh Jesus it is admirable to see how devoted he is though yeah like he doesn't he doesn't drink he doesn't do anything he he's actually he's not one of those people that just preach it he actually follows it sometimes it does make me go like damn like there's something there like he really cares a lot you know it's easier we're busy guys okay five times a day he gets his five minutes I'm just saying this guy Titanic have you seen it no I haven't seen it at all was it that before I was born before I was 18 I didn't even listen to music because I was like this is a waste time I should watch more YouTube I'm an idiot are you like a I'm not even are you like on a spectrum of some kind probably a little bit I've never gotten tested but it's just like if you want to make great YouTube videos you just watch YouTube so like a two hour movie you can watch like 20 YouTube videos and you get exponentially smarter doing that you know Mark just Wikipedia's movies so he knows what happens and then uses codes from them you know I actually thought about paying someone to like just give me a synopsis of all the biggest movies because like I have never watched Harry Potter or Star Wars or any of it and the amount of times in my life people just you know are like what you've never seen it yeah like it's it used to be funny now it's getting to the point where it's like it's kind of sad so you didn't even watch squid game uh no that I did watch before we filmed it of course and then after watching it were you like wow this is fun yeah we should recreate it but in general we're like whoa like TV shows are cool there's a feeling you can get from a long form series it's really good this is the thing where people misconstrue I don't think movies are bad I just think I want to be the greatest YouTuber to ever live and so like I should just focus on my thing you know I think you've achieved that already uh yeah which is why now I do watch a little bit more let me ask you that about being the greatest YouTube ever what's next because I was listening to your Rogan and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president I know I'll say that'd be fun is that something you've thought about yeah the only thing political aspirations um uh yeah I I would love to I just feel like you have to do a lot of politics leading up to it and I don't know like if you could just go from you know no one ever has done this just being a celebrity to just being president that would be great but if I have to like work my way up and be like a bear I think we've realized you don't have to yeah it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really yeah that'd be bro if I'm telling you if I was if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just give away every penny literally zero dollars for my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing like you're voting for me yeah I like I have 10 billion dollars give away every penny can't be bought because I you know I gave all my money and then I just do what's best for people and I like this yeah and just ignore lobbyists or whatever I like but you need to keep money in order to ignore the lobbyists because otherwise no I give it all away and we're good well there's freedom and I get 400 Grand a year of this President I'm good oh yeah you can live off that 100 and the taxpayers yeah dude I like this I think that I hear you I think if I wanted to like 24 right now yeah so it didn't feel okay yeah it'd be like three more Cycles but I wouldn't do I'd probably do it in my mid-40s yeah yeah I think I could make it interesting enough where I could win okay well how what give away all my money and just like you know I know how to give people's attention I can't say too much because I don't regret it in the future I think yeah I'll just trick all the [ __ ] idiots and before you do that PornHub would you take over that oh my God I would like to do the thumbnails and you know just boost the CTR yeah more saturation yeah you said uh I bought YouTube early on in the interview you said this is what I'm gonna do for the next 10 years of my life you have it's 10 years you're doing YouTube and then what you said a very specific number yeah um well I don't know it just kind of depends how things go like if we have thousands of Beast burgers and feastables go as well when we start mobile game company and other stuff like that I don't know there might just be a world where I run those companies uh yeah it's just let me just see it what do you like what do you like better you like creating or running the companies I love creating and I also it's weird I like both but you like running the companies yeah I do it's a lot of fun it's like being like it's much easier to run a burger joint than to have to like break the internet every week you know I made our to run feastfuls you know I mean because you just get a kick-ass team and you just kind of like Point them in the right direction whereas like this is like I gotta do just crazy [ __ ] that's never thought of and it's a coin flip and you don't even really know of people who care yeah you gotta do that every week and it's all got to be me yeah all sitting around me every week forever yeah um but I enjoy both I think like yeah um like we just opened up our first physical piece Burger which is crushing it um that one's doing like 30 000 a day right now wow and then feastables is in every Walmart now and that's crushing it so it's it's interesting I I'm so impressed by your ability to scale I think that's the toughest thing for a Creator scale like scale your business so like hire a team train that team yes to do those roles so that you can create more time for yourself yeah and I think that's like an unbelievably difficult thing like for me I find it incredibly different I often find like I'm the bottleneck for the things that we're doing 100 and that's not to say that all these guys aren't unbelievably talented and better than me in every single thing that they do yeah but a lot of times it might come down to a decision I have to make and then all of a sudden we're Limited in an output 100 and yeah I'm just like the way you should see it yeah is like you know if hypothetically like for creating content you have like the making the video having the production the editing camera work or whatever writing stuff like even if you split your time evenly you can only put 25 of your time to each whereas like an editor can put 100 of their time into it so like even if they're the same skill level as you they're just gonna [ __ ] on you because they have more time same with the camera guy or writer or whatever and so I think that's where a lot of people just don't realize like they're like well this person isn't as great is me or I can make better decisions yeah but you know 25 is generous so you can probably spend like 10 20 times more time than you can doing it yeah and so due to the sheer extra time they're gonna [ __ ] on you at that job or they [ __ ] on you mean just do it way better just do it better because they have more time yeah yeah like if I had to edit a video you know I just I'd have to put in literally one 100th the amount of time you know what I mean so they should be able to do better tricks should be a better cameraman than me because he could study it 30 000 times more than me now did you find initially I think this was our issue as we were starting to grow we've tried to rectify a bit but like uh that you were hiring people who could do a bunch of things when did you start getting specific in your hires um almost right away that's smart yeah yeah because I feel like what we did is like everybody did a little of everything and then it's hard to [ __ ] scale because we're all doing a little we're trying to pay less salary quite frankly oh really I mean one guy you can hire to do everything no no no I'm not a Chiefs game did you hear me beat Netflix with this special so so you immediately knew you're like okay just need these guys camera these guys editing yeah 100 yeah because you wouldn't hire a guy that box your floors to edit a video obviously yeah yeah we didn't do that we didn't do that we got the guys to edits him off the floor you understand absolutely literally yeah literally yeah yeah no yeah it is crazy thanks like because our main channel is killing it the gaming channel is killing it all it's it's wild part of the process makes you the most like gives you the most dopamine 100 uploading the video seeing like the real time in like the first five hours it gets like five million views it feels so great that's my favorite I always tell them my my favorite part of the day we drop an episode or like we drop a clip I go to the gym right when it drops I'm working out listening to tribal music watch like just refreshing YouTube studio and then you see it hit one and you're like oh what's that drug I imagine that's what it feels like Tesla it's the closest thing it's the closest thing it's so funny exactly that's that's my version yeah he still said Tesla was better because he said that's the closest thing well yeah I mean opposed to like artificially implanting your brains with chemicals yeah the closest the sand is like the the artificial hunt you know what I mean that's what it is yeah seeing the number just go up minute over a minute yeah back in the jungle I'm working out I'm running I'm on the treadmill trying to get the food and all of a sudden the views go up ugh the best best thing ever now is it equally painful if it doesn't do well no at this point are you like unattached to yeah you just look well because why what me getting depressed doesn't do anything you just look at it could should we change the thumbnail change it doesn't work better okay look at the retention graph why did it too bad take some notes move on you know what I mean like being super emotional over it doesn't really do anything it's usually uh which I used to be like if I had a bad video you would know like I'm like I would literally like cry you know especially when like I was betting the farm on every video like that's it you know then it was like [ __ ] like you know I can't pay Tariq if this doesn't do well wait did you ever have a week like that uh yeah but I would just take out a loan and then the next video all right we're gonna spend a little less guys um but now that we're like not as Reckless it's like yeah it's a lot easier to not care as much so you took out a loan to make the next video so yeah you went like uh yeah there was one month where I had to take | I know all about YouTube analytics do you want me to help you with that I could use the help that's you yeah are you logged into the show's channel oh [ __ ] yeah hold on hold on hold on uh oh God that one was uh no the mile highs I was going to Antarctica a billion dollars if we could own the channel and the companies and stuff like that like that sounds enticing but but you've been offered a billion dollars for your YouTube channel with all the companies yeah what's different about the squid game video what did you tap into I I most spent like two million dollars on a video up to that point that one we spent 4.2 million that Sky up there is not real starting at the end of the blue is all CGI yeah all CGI and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president is that something you thought about it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just gave away every penny well there's literally zero dollars in my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing and then I just do what's best for people I like this yeah [Music] we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy | 6 | 8 | 4 | I know all about YouTube analytics do you want me to help you with that I could use the help that's you yeah are you logged into the show's channel | what's different about the squid game video what did you tap into | 2,2,5 | 0,4,3 | 2 | 2 | 5 | 0 | 4 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGrk7Mzm4uo | 13,469 | WGrk7Mzm4uo | 2022-09-27 00:00:00 | I know all about YouTube analytics do you want me to help you with that I could use the help that's you yeah are you logged into the show's channel oh [ __ ] yeah hold on hold on hold on uh oh God that one was uh no the mile highs I was going to Antarctica a billion dollars if we could own the channel and the companies and stuff like that like that sounds enticing but but you've been offered a billion dollars for your YouTube channel with all the companies yeah what's different about the squid game video what did you tap into I I most spent like two million dollars on a video up to that point that one we spent 4.2 million that Sky up there is not real starting at the end of the blue is all CGI yeah all CGI and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president is that something you thought about it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just gave away every penny well there's literally zero dollars in my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing and then I just do what's best for people I like this yeah [Music] we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy good job your parents loved you when you're younger okay you don't no one's an elf did you just call me an elf it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice [Applause] should we fake your death he's trying to tear this whole thing apart like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga um like is there any steaks I said shakes or steaks what's up everybody and welcome to flagrant and today we are joined by Mr b6000 yeah it's funny because I don't have that name anymore wait why don't you have it did you abort it or something oh my God this is a great one uh yes welcome to flagrant I'm here because I had nothing better to do good that's the best reason to be here and uh and we're happy about it and we're just hoping that by the end of this episode I make the same amount of money as I did coming into the episode yeah I mean ideally but I'll just take the same fair enough you know we just don't lose a brand I mean you actually operate at a loss though based on your Rogan so we can do that oh yeah we can do that no problem that's true yeah but that's why if it dips it's a bigger loss you have the most brilliant way of saying that you make lots of money I agree but how no you say I make all this money and then you're like but I spend it all yeah but you still get to say that you make it yeah yeah so no one can really [ __ ] with you when it comes to making the money well I don't spend the money that's to you know for that reason but I guess that is true yeah if it does make it easier when people are like do you make a couple million a month like yeah because I just spend it all so it does make it exactly because if I did it if I was like oh yeah just make a couple million and that was the end then I just seemed like a douchebag exactly yes I do agree but I never really thought about it that way I did thank you you're like Adam Sandler in that way it's not like a multi-millionaire but you're like one of the guys still oh I like them like usually like really rich people you know we want to eat them yeah they buy speedsters and uh yeah and mansions and go on vacations to them all fees twice watches yeah and watches yeah yeah it's a replica right gambling degenerative are you one of the rich people they want to eat are you I'm not that rich not yet you are way more Rich than me uh but I I give my money away I'm poor yeah I give my money to my wife so what's your matter I feel like your fiscal policy is going to completely change once you get yeah yeah yeah yeah just giving away stuff all the time like yeah do more reaction videos from the kitchen yeah that's the reason is there a uh Mrs Beast there is we've only been dating like six months okay my boy how long have you been married don't do that it's media training yeah that was very good uh I've been married since the 18th of December no no December 18th I got married right decision really yes I recommend you do it and you don't need a place because you don't make any money okay did you get one did I get a prenup yeah she got me gonna regret that whatever something happens I know at least like three people who got one and I was friends with them when they got married and then like two of them you know didn't work out and every single one it's just interesting to see it go from like yeah we'll be together forever to like [ __ ] this is the worst decision of my life did you did you think about giving them some money uh because that'd be a great video this money yeah yeah just helping my friend who just got divorced tell you know the people at our food banks like less money this month gotta help my divorce they would actually get it they'd be like yeah they probably would he needs it he's probably waiting in line next to them yeah yeah is one of your friends that got divorced here uh no definitely not these 18 year olds no children Tara could have a child bride or something like that no not exactly sure [Laughter] um now you brought your son here bring your kids to work day yeah yeah now is that uncomfortable at all for you about to have my kids here yeah no and bring them back to work this is getting so uncomfortable we just wanted to give Carl a shout out we love Carl we're Big Carl fans here okay so you make millions and millions and millions of dollars who cares right yeah sure I make money because it's so much money you make just tons I don't know what to do with it you don't even know what to do with it no greed okay we don't I don't know okay but that's the fun thing yeah so it's just so much [ __ ] money okay and then you're giving it away constantly yep right and then More's coming in yeah and giving it away it's basically what I did like we I just had this Theory what well hopefully the Ponzi scheme never implodes got you like you know positive schemes are great up until they just go bust but no I had this idea when I was like 18 I was like when I made a couple thousand dollars a month I was like What if I just give it away and just try to make a little bit more than a couple thousand and then I just was like oh that worked and then I did it again yeah and I've done it every month ever since and I'm just like oh well it just works and it's like a couple Grand turned into 10 turned into 100 turn in a million it just keeps going up and I'm like oh now when when you ever did like the challenges where you're giving away to your guys if they win yeah were you ever worried that you would make them not really want to work that should be stimulus no no uh no especially when we were doing a lot they act different when they make like 150 grams yeah we're doing a lot of them hey they were like 10 grand or 20 grand and this was like Chris just left his job at Best Buy Tariq literally got I tried to hire Teri and he said no and then he went to work at a hospital then a year later he's like I'm depressed and I was like come on over most of them though like were just new and had like no money so like back then when they were fighting those challenges like that was like basically at the time so that's why uh but yeah you do see as time went on they didn't go as long the challenges and that's when obviously we transitioned to people like random people like at the start I wouldn't hook the boys up and then once they were good we're like okay let's start doing we can just start doing other people okay talk about hooking up uh when you're on Rogan you no no no you you brought up the fact that when you posted your first video it was when you got hacked playing uh Pirates battle pirates yeah whatever yeah have you found out who did it no I didn't but I should have they not reached out how would they Mr b6000 is their username right yes what are they gonna tweet me on Twitter like yeah you can do a YouTube video about it I'm Olivia's highest viewed video okay because because the story don't tell the story about like all of five people listening we're gonna [ __ ] the algorithm up already yeah you did [ __ ] your attention you know what um it's fine you know if you don't want this to your views that's up to you so um you're his son you're so true he starts this off with like oh by the way Joe Rogan got 10 million views and you know what goes through my head when he says I was like well it's completely up to the topics you bring up on whether or not we do it no I mean if this gets like a 40 minute retention we're passing that if this is like 25 minutes we're screwed yeah yeah so now we're down there okay so make this story I guess you know it gives a [ __ ] about a guy that hacked me when I was 11 years old on Facebook [ __ ] them our audience is actually uh older than 17. so why don't you go ahead they're insistent okay so when I was 11 I was playing the game a guy just started just destroying me absolutely crushing me every day he had to come through and attack my face and I got pissed so I made a video saying [ __ ] this guy although why there was no words I didn't know how to record audio I was stupid but it was just like him I just sent it to the devs and I uploaded it to YouTube and then it somehow got 20 000 views first video ever gets twenty thousand that's crazy because people who played the game would just watch it but they were trying to figure out how to hack and then like all the comments were like oh so there's a guy out there that's responsible for you posting on YouTube yeah for making pissing me off when I was 11 and then inadvertently making me make a video and he could be listening right now what do you want to say to that guy um thanks for making me Rich he needs a royalty name something I found out who he is would you break him off with a little something yeah of course I give him a couple thousand dollars what do you mean couple thousand that's at least a million right yeah no get him on it dude [ __ ] that guy oh you want to play Pirates now watch this that's a great question when when you're buried alive like do you guys ever think about like him being mean as a boss oh tell them your plan for if you die oh yeah they want me to die oh yeah 100 great video big time they do because the second I died yeah um Carl Chandler Chris the three guys Nolan maybe he's a little newer we haven't decided if he partakes yet or not yeah uh they all put their hand in my Tombstone last take it off gets the channel Everything 100 everything oh what about it dude you just left the brown guy out of this he's not on care he's the camera guy so like most people haven't seen him I mean I don't know what do you think Tariq gets to put his hand on the tombstone yes I think so as of right now it's just written in the like little plan it's just those three we have to update it and put Nolan and maybe Tariq in it yes it's like because we have a little gameplay so you know they can film the video yeah that is happening mark my words I don't even know if I've really said it publicly I tweeted it one time but I'm serious I don't give a [ __ ] how much you guys are cry right put their [ __ ] hands on the tombstone and give the channel to whoever wins okay and don't bully them for it they're just doing what I want and and you guys think you could do without him right like an interesting experiment I'm down should we fake your death dude oh [ __ ] no just like I want to do this the next 10 years and if I do that then like if I fake that did I pick count to 100 000. good point good point you can't take anything okay uh hold on real quick real quick most illegal go for it no uh most illegal video honestly I try to brainstorm legal videos so yeah that's probably a better use of your time okay um what about what about like a competition like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay is that the notepad you're flipping yeah yeah yeah yeah go ahead rip it up three that I for the podcast he's just slide through okay um this is a good tell me if you think this has good one retention and good like uh click through okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga that could work um like is there any steaks say again like anything on the line uh I said shakes or steaks I just got Invisalign all right my s's are not gonna come off correctly like maybe if it's like losers car gets hit by a meteor or something that's a good one that's good I like that okay oh okay wait a hundred kids go to an island last one leaves gets an internship with Jeffrey Epstein thoughts right he's dead or is he I haven't seen the body um yeah it's a banger that's right I don't know but yeah for the right reasons but you know get clicks it's probably by the FBI okay you were investigated by the FBI was that well that's what we're wondering oh no I was hunted by them for a video were they really hunting someone else in your crew you want to inform me do you know something I don't I think we know who he's looking at I don't know he's looking at Carl I was looking at Carl I was looking at Carl's dad and nobody else hey hey bro I'm gonna need you to respect Tariq yeah I do okay all right I'm gonna have to walk up yeah yeah you respect to people were spectators one trillion dollars I give you right now uh okay I have to spend it on the video okay what is it uh I bought everything I wanted in life and I just buy everything everything I don't think I get you to a trillion dog I'm gonna be honest now humans are expensive bro like oh I can figure it out people are like you couldn't spend a billion a day if you wanted to [ __ ] 10 super Yachts problem solved I could I could spend a trillion okay I'm just calling up like people who own neighborhoods buying entire neighborhoods you know wow I could figure it out one trillion you buy everything you want in life yeah I would just literally buy like half of America why not have you look into buying a planet uh uh no I mean like they're so far away you know how much cooler it is if planets weren't like 500 000 light years away there's like a realistic way we could visit them in our life yeah I feel like we'd all be way happier yeah yeah we'll just get out of here for a little bit it won't just stress Our Lives it's more fun yeah yeah but it's like you have to like build a ship and send it off and people have to have kids on it and kids and their kids will maybe see that planet it's kind of lame yeah yeah thing I mean that's what your boy's trying to do at least yeah Elon yeah yeah my boy did you believe him when he made that offer what offer if something bad happens to him oh on Twitter I love dude you did your research you think that you're gonna come on this bro my journalistic Integrity oh yeah he thinks he's a journalist but I'm a journalist bro really yeah well then you need to make up some lies that sounds good yeah yeah well first he has to buy it and then yeah I'm very confident if he bought it and died he'd give it to me totally and not the ambassadors that have tens of billions of dollars in it hmm that's a bad enemy to make though I wouldn't have made that deal with you what that oh if I I own Twitter if I die if I die then you get it the guy that is making videos and doing crazy could you imagine someone assassinates him but then like the holy motive I wonder who it could be okay and then they just want to assassinate him yeah they get a [ __ ] YouTube channel but what would you even do with Twitter I mean I don't know sell it's worth a lot of money Give It Away give it give it to a subscribers get some money oh no you stop being poor help him okay because he doesn't need help he he doesn't believe in philanthropy oh no I do believe no no you don't believe in places we've talked about this word on the streets you hate plenty I don't hate it I believe in it um what do you donate to say again we've talked about this a million I donated to Catholic Church I donated sperm for like the first maybe like no it's not three years [Laughter] I believe in philanthropy you've literally never done it I do believe in it he believes in it as an idea he just hasn't gotten around to it no I think I believe when you do it I think you do it yeah yeah wait I believe it you believe him I believe people do it what do you mean I don't know can I believe it and also not do it look I'm saying Jimmy donates millions of dollars every year he plants trees yeah he helps people yes food pantries yeah and you also have a lump of money yeah that you could use to help other people and why don't you um I I feel like you're doing a good job like if everybody what if I have a burger and I have chocolate and I'm giving everybody money and I'm giving everybody Islands you know what I mean your changes how many [ __ ] white oprahs do we need there we go I should give more man yeah agreed why why when did you start giving when I was like 15. oh you started young yeah that's the problem The Habit has been built yeah yeah exactly we're too old to start we got money ladies yeah yeah perfectly logical reason more importantly yeah everyone always talks about obviously you yo yo yo can you stop bullying us no He's a Bully but I love it this guy's a bully dude yeah yeah bro you're a [ __ ] on his side well I'm just saying I didn't realize son of a [ __ ] did you realize he's taller than you two he's the bullet everyone how tall are you wow all right okay your Netflix special that you you know sold on your own and you made more than they would have paid you yeah have you ever was with Netflix but yeah yeah have you ever like said how much money was publicly or anything like that no I haven't do you ever plan on it just every time I hear it I'm always curious like even on the car right over I like was thinking about I was like uh just how much did you [ __ ] on Netflix you know well this guy's good it's not I didn't say it was Netflix Oh wait really yeah I thought that was the whole thing everybody found it was Netflix I never said which one it is he's never revealed that bro I was beyond certain it was Netflix I don't [ __ ] know because he looks at the stock market Netflix is like here's a three million bang yeah delete some jokes and you're like [ __ ] you and then you made like 20 million and you just shat on them I didn't make 20 million yeah obviously that was just the number I put on my head but yeah what's happening yeah if I want bro do you plan on telling us how badly you should on said streaming service I I plan on just taking a moment [ __ ] an [ __ ] dude you just threw out 20 like it was nothing bro I apologize yeah I'm gonna talk [ __ ] man that's it now I'm putting it on YouTube because you said that what the number I'm gonna put the whole special on YouTube there and he's gonna donate his money and I'm gonna donate the money hold on to it hold on to it I'm gonna donate to who you said I'm gonna donate it to me and my wife I'm gonna donate to us and then when you get a divorce you'll get half of it [ __ ] [Laughter] [Laughter] any other [ __ ] questions no but I want that story we were talking about beforehand yeah about the yeah so when he was uh going through video ideas it reminded me of someone who just I can't remember if it was Dubai or somewhere in the Middle East this guy hired a private investigator in North Carolina I have no context to find me um and this is just something that happens yeah someone this happens a lot so whenever people call local private investigators they just let us know because a lot of people just want to know where I am for whatever reason oh the private investigators call you directly yeah it's usually which now I'm giving away my secrets but oh well I'm In Too Deep but yeah um so he calls us lets us know he's like this time it's someone from like Dubai we don't really know what he wants but he's just flying to North Carolina tomorrow and he just paid me to find you and we're like okay cool um and so then the next day he gets there and then with the private I have security somebody's security woman to private investigator to meet him and my Security's just like why the [ __ ] are you here why are you trying to find Jimmy and the guy's like I just have video ideas I really want to give them and my security is like [ __ ] you why are you actually here he's he just kept saying it like 30 times in a row he's just like I just want to give him the sheet of ideas so it's just a piece of paper with video ideas flies across the world private investigator everything instead of like we don't believe you and so they like he let them my security search his hotel room couldn't find anything nothing in there just a suitcase of clothes um and he's just literally just did all that to give me a list of ideas and then and then well my security was like oh Jimmy's out of town for three months did you ever get the [ __ ] yeah well then just get took it I was like I'll give it to Jimmy and then he gave it to me and it was just like it was like open up a free gas station like open that's actually that's a very Middle Eastern idea yeah he's trying to make money off you it was like 30 ideas like that and I was just like this is actually a lot of women read in public or something like that we we did get squid game out of that [ __ ] yeah [ __ ] I sold a guy from Dubai's idea this is before the real squid game that's the game yeah no he wrote it all out yeah this guy just hired private investigators flew down there all this muddy camped out just to give me a list of video ideas and none of them were good none of them were good I got I got plenty of ideas yeah yeah I need ideas give me the Dubai ideas it's much easier to fly here at the North Carolina do you have a lot of people uh doing that like uh just okay you hear the stories of people going like I risk everything to be here like I saw Carl's story of like I spent my last dollar and then I ended up working out and that kind of inspires every lunatic to take their last dollar yeah to just show up I just I live in my studio now yeah so it's like fin stand and stuff that's and most people know that so they don't but sometimes you know the gym in the bedroom but sometimes I'll go out and they'll just be like yeah this guy's just been camping behind a gas station for like a month waiting to see you and I'm like lovely and how do you say I just like tell him I'm just not interested like that's not how you know I like to meet people but that's still like occasionally happens and it's always like that never pissed them off because you're not like I mean that's not the nicest I'm not I don't think anyone expects me to just go and be people who just can't battle wait for my attention because you don't know like they might be trying to kill me they might be whatever yeah so it used to be it's weird I like hostiles sometimes it's like a lot and then sometimes it's not as much yeah have you ever had a dangerous moment like with your security where they had to intervene and like get someone off you um dangerous car can you think of one uh not really no nobody cares enough yeah you know Baxter's ever a crowd of five people is it ever women waiting to see okay Mr Beast no I usually um no but we've never had any like crazy issues it's actually kind of weird like with the mall one like that went really well even though like crazy yeah at one point there's like 20 000 people in there yeah and girls showing tits and [ __ ] these are jokes these are videos these are children really they're screenshots in the video of like of girls like flashing I hope not yeah no that was nuts it was crazy yeah and they had like the the American flag like pasties or whatever like that this is not true you didn't see this it's on it's there was a whole quibby series that they made about is that what it was nope turn the phone when within five seconds of using quibby I want to watch the show and I was like this is garbage I went to screenshot and the screenshot was black yeah and that's how I knew it would fail because you can't make memes they made it where you couldn't take screenshots of anything Netflix's problem too yeah well at least Netflix like you can watch it on your computer and it's easier to screenshot yeah clivia was phone only and there's zero way to take a screenshot okay so it's like how the [ __ ] do you expect these shows to go viral yeah like that was the same time of baby Yoda and all this stuff and then quibby's just like no no memes yeah and it's like no one's ripping your [ __ ] shows can you explain that a little bit more about how like memes Drive the culture of 100 yeah like the Mandalorian you get rid of baby Yoda memes it's like nobody even talks about it exactly I I never would watch it now when you're creating videos here you also going like what do you think will be memeable in this uh I probably should but no but no yeah right now I'm just film and TV like film TV it's what is memeable no not only it's just it's just something that happens naturally if you're just kidding or no one can take screenshots and you're just an idiot you know I mean because that's how you just get attention on Twitter it's like cutting one of your legs out for money yeah if you try to make a meme then your cringe like memes just happen yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you mean like if you're the creator of the TV show like The House of dragons is going this is the memeable moment exactly you I don't think you can ever do that you can't force them you can embrace it though after it's like organically possible lean in yeah yeah I think you have to yeah that like what is that movie morbius or whatever yeah movie that got absolutely destroyed yeah did you see there but it still did well right I don't know I'm pretty sure like the destroying it caused it to they put it back out in theaters oh really it went viral as like a meme and they're like we're re-releasing it opinion says well with the like people actually I was enjoyed though yeah you did that you did yeah we did we bought every ticket in a theater and then we just flooded with people in suits oh it's amazing it's great and I heard they made that [ __ ] illegal yeah like they did a few places yeah it's like for the first seven three years I go to a movie theater and then like three days later it's like no you can't do that also like uh the most mature way to dress yeah right yeah it has a very cultish feel to it though just a bunch of young white kids in suits and whatever yo yeah this is scary you're saying if there's like a bunch of white people all dressed the same you would like to make you feel uncomfortable a little bit I wonder if I walked in and it was just a hundred black people in suits how I would feel yeah Men In Black because I think the New Mexico Studios what's going on yeah that is wild I don't know why that is concerning it shouldn't be illegal but it does make you literally because some of them started lighting firecrackers in the movie theater and one of them like blew up a couple seats I told you man it's a dangerous thing you can't trust that many white people just the same why we get out of it we get out of hand you get yeah you get one group thinking it's just a it's just a mob also yeah yeah but it is fun see me and then we break it up so it's not too much white boy [ __ ] going on yeah yeah so every time Mark and I are starting to get hyped about things yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not good that's actually a really good idea that's why fatic is a part of the team so that's it gotcha too much fun he's not good we keep his camera off he's like Sid Vicious we don't even use it yeah you're content made it but just in case you guys start going you want to go to Charlottesville he's like everybody chill out this is very important that's how you build your team oh that's smart Teresa Foundation right yes okay this is good are they allowed to have girlfriends is the team allowed to have girlfriends I wish not but you know if they want to are they just drowning in strange or what oh my gosh let's cut over time boy [Laughter] dude okay girl I didn't know you had it like that my voice [Music] [Laughter] Nola's got a little something going on I know 100 right chain out by the way yeah oh I love it some wild [ __ ] boys you got over here oh [ __ ] crazy again what are you guys do on a Saturday like split a six-pack of white claws dude all right well I don't I just work all the time yeah yeah so I usually see them when we're filming but outside that I don't see them too much anymore okay how do you split the work balance with your girl you've introduced this relationship in last time yeah that's what US married guys want to know yeah I got you guys the answers you've been needing she's actually from South Africa so she can only come here 90 days a year anyways so it just naturally Works itself out [Music] African-American uh I'm working on it a white woman and African-American oh there's your video wedding episode it is a little weird that like like she makes good money she's like gone to college multiple degrees everything you would want you would want her here yeah but I still feel like there's just literally no way to get her in America like you why don't we like reform our immigration process we're like yeah we should let in the good ones right who said that why are you making it bad why are you making it bad you're twisting I don't want my girlfriend you've been doing this to him for an hour okay um but you can marry her and then she's in yeah I'll just marry her yeah that seems like a reasonable way you could actually have Nolan do it no one could marry your guy it would be a great video is that like a company could I just pay someone to marry her yeah yeah really is that like it's not a company but no one can do it are you thinking about I don't know what like if she has to marry someone I see on it you know this is a little bit but if it doesn't do anything but it feels just like some guy that I'll never see again and they just like marry so she can move here like but he might try something no no one's an elf look at that like he's not gonna do anything yeah but the problem is no one will make fun of me but the thing is because there's a lot of the Rings call me an elf yeah [Music] it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice it's a compliment cookies in a tree that's what he's saying no Lord of the Rings bro I've seen Lord of the Rings I just don't know what I look like you know the people that you're like my family no no not your ears your [ __ ] head and your skin and your yes your beauty [Laughter] married to my girlfriend maybe he's not doing nothing yeah but he's got that over himself no he doesn't win a single argument anymore that's it why what happened because I'm married to your girlfriend but then you can also look at that do you know who that is Legolas yes yeah yeah yeah [Laughter] wait what else do we got in here yeah yeah yeah I was surprised you're not grabbing your phone back wait you're gonna let him look him look at your photos yeah yeah yeah it can't happen no yeah okay you you guys should trade phones that'd be fun oh me and you yeah do you want to do that ah I feel like he's just gonna like go through my YouTube analytics and start blurting out numbers well I maybe that's actually a great idea actually probably he wasn't good do you want me to help you with that I I could use the help that'd be great I mean we could work on some TMS are you the behind the scenes guy no it's all it's awesome [Laughter] yeah are you logged into the show's channel yeah what are we doing right now wait hold on hold on hold on what are we doing here we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy bro no you're killing it crazy guys he's a good job I keep up the good work you know what I will not compliment you the rest yeah he's gonna give you advice and then you're gonna give him your parents loved you and you're younger you don't know someone abused this man and he just doesn't know how to take us off I'm proud of you for having two million subscribers wow and he's like what the [ __ ] did you just say I was like I'm proud wow okay Solomon over here bro yeah you could tell the accuracy by how fast we both did Jesus Christ my Dad loved me at least you know hey Mom still stepped it up a little bit so it's RPM's a little how do we get that up yeah yeah what'd he say RPM RPMs yeah I've been working on those yeah yeah you definitely I love the RPM so you swear a lot in the video say again you swear a lot in the videos I I wouldn't no you did I could tell you dude just look at the revenue I don't swear you have to I don't swear it wouldn't be this love you didn't swear racist a lot but that's not cussing gotcha do you know what I mean yeah a substitute like you know oh you're saying say things that are wrong yeah you say things that you know advertisers naughty yes but we have great advertisers the numbers it's just funny that like I could never looking for a chocolate bar sponsorship actually can we sponsor the next one yeah how do you charge an episode for you yeah free oh philanthropy thank you yeah you almost said Felicia it's only one other time okay palette of chocolate right there matter of fact we need to replace the trees we will replace it with a paddle of chocolate matter of fact matter of fact I've been wanting to try your burger let's see how fast are the Beast Burgers usually come go Mark uh uh probably 30 minutes 30 minutes well we might get them a little quicker uh what are they here is it only hamburgers or do you have anything for people who aren't going uh yeah he doesn't eat beef we have a grilled cheese oh that sounds fun I'm working on oh no we have impossible meat as well okay I forgot we launched that it's just like three percent of our sales like no one gives a [ __ ] I was like really expecting people to [ __ ] with the plant-based first we were friends you know what I mean I thought we had a thing and we just [ __ ] on him together no what this that's nothing it's just in general America just doesn't give a [ __ ] thank you yeah because I was like really hoping that would like explode and like no one cared about the impossible me yeah and we also did like lettuce wraps where you can substitute the bun for a letter that sounds great like that yeah that sounds fun when people want a burger they want a burger that's what I found out the hardware what's up guys today's episode is sponsored by surf shark surf shark is a modern VPN design with the user in mind their utilities are powered by a robust security mechanism but designed to be simple intuitive to use enjoy all the freedoms of an open internet safely and 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back to the show look at this how long have these been sitting around hold on one second because if they say these are bad it's not my fault no we got some real Beast Burgers okay this is it Mr Beast that old ass packaging oh oh God here we go wait a minute okay this is weird that looks awful like a Big Mac s Special Sauce it looks like a Big Mac dude I mean when you order we order from McDonald's cheese lettuce onions oh what is this it looked like two old beef patties mustard sauce pickles cheese lettuce I just thought it says hasn't been opened yeah so this is a Big Mac then you guys really move it off how are you going to use my card and not get an impossible Burger you can eat beef why not oh I mean it's impossible this is a beast Burger this is what happens when you hang out with comedian yes okay so these do look like Big Mac so that is a big mac oh that is yeah oh so that's what the Beast burger no you can't help your [ __ ] you but no don't know what's going on let me see this he uses ghost kitchens right oh this one though that looks more like her that's what hold on let me okay that's it hold on hold on hold on dude do you have like a do you have like a team that we could call like an HR son that's crazy because we didn't do that you did no we did not swear there's not a coincidence that the ones without the stickers are Big Macs and the ones with the stickers not opened aren't [Laughter] yeah it looks like it's been centered around a little bit but it looks good I'm gonna take a bite right now it's not my fault if it's been sitting out for an hour is there money in there oh no I'm not gonna lie I have fire it's got fries on it um that's bar hey that's Chandler so whoever's on our marketing team make an ad of him saying that and just run it all over that's fine just Target everyone within 100 mile radius of this or anyone that goes to a show just hit him with Instagram ads if I'm going that's far I think that's [ __ ] fire right there what do you rate that one out of ten burger burger review honestly down down honestly no not honestly guys while you're ready I'm honest with you right now this needs a little more sauce okay probably because it's been sitting around a little bit it's dried up oh yeah you this this the version they ordered is the one with no sauce well you don't need to throw it like that that's the old factory they need to update it they need to update that [ __ ] yeah agree [ __ ] that package agreed what's wrong with Angry Birds Packaging Patty yeah excellent I agree Patty is excellent dare I say the best you've ever had for fast food okay dude I'm an in and out Enthusiast I feel the return retention you know just give us the rating so we can love it holy [ __ ] that's reduction step it up bro miles the single please one out of ten all right you know what I'll take it if it saves the podcast it's just hardwired you can't spend a decade of your life studying how to go violent how to get people to watch the video and then have it fire bomb in front of your eyes to not like hurt your soul yeah so you think about that with everything yeah it'd be like the same as if I started doing stand up there and it was just god-awful you would be like I gotta like what about during sex do you ever be like oh my God I'm starting to look around the room a little bit like Africa would be nice to be back right now it's been more than three minutes I think we got enough RPMs so is there a collab burger or food product that we the flagrant Beast products yeah I know [Music] [Laughter] [Laughter] so Jimmy gave you some advice on your channel we'll suck less yeah um what is uh what's your advice for his channel oh number one uh plane crash video very close to 911. I intentionally made sure we did not upload in September they were like you know we might need more time I was like you don't have more time [Applause] I was like this is like we're a couple days away from September like that's so funny it's like no one gives you advice on your channel so this is gonna be a perfect tons of advice every time I upload I get like 40 phone calls from people tell me how it could be about it is there somebody you watch that you still learn a lot from on YouTube that you're like oh that guy I could learn from uh I mean everyone like even like anybody more than anyone else anybody no it changes it's just like I just like watching random Youtube videos and like even like a homeless person on the street you can learn something from like how to be more humble or what what it's like for someone who's struggling so like if you apply that same mindset to videos like every video you watch there's something you can learn especially if it has a million views like there's a reason it got a million views okay I could give you the dumb dick joke answer Alex didn't believe that you got buried oh you didn't no interesting he had a whole reason for why you didn't get buried I kind of forgot you don't just forget yourself this is the most viewed video You're questioning my existence yeah exactly I'm just saying the camera angles made it seem as though oh I could have fixed it I remember this whoa I know and I think you're you're worth too much to take that risk uh yeah my mom was like crying when I filmed this video I was like Mom I promise we did the math um let me skip to over here to show you there's a scene where the boys literally dig down and yeah see that penis sign yeah they literally dug down and put that there yeah uh so you you could have planned wait wait right here oh Carl wait wait for the cut right here look you can literally see where they put the sign there and how deep it is underground or that could have just been shot at a different time where whoa Carl is on to us what if like to Arena like Brandon here it was like hey Jimmy I need you really uncomfortable yeah okay with this video specifically okay yeah um well there's two I'm curious about for the same reason this the one where you're in the the outdoor pool and you're under underwater yeah the thing bro that was done like five years ago this yeah the headache yeah have you figured out what that was about yeah it's because uh I was an idiot back then in the like we were pumping air in but the CO2 or whatever the [ __ ] you it doesn't get pumped out yeah getting pumped out yeah so you're just inhaling your own carbon yeah and so then when I started getting a headache I was like oh [ __ ] and then dioxide yeah yeah carbon dioxide so then we like called someone who know what they're doing they're like yeah you're an idiot yeah yeah okay and I just got out immediately okay and then when you're buried under this is what we learned from it so we had a pump that was pumping in air and pumping out the old Air what was the most catastrophic thought you had while you were completely buried I uh tried there was a camera at my feet three could also talk about this too uh and I went to like go adjust it and I couldn't so I like literally turned around and I'm you know not super flexible so I literally like was going to turn and so like I'm laying like this and as I'm like Disney I got caught like halfway and I was like [ __ ] I'm [ __ ] I'm fine I was literally like guys if I can't get out of this in two seconds you start digging right the [ __ ] now because I was like cotton is super awkward position like in the thing and I just like I'm gonna give it one last try and I just pushed as hard as I could and I popped out the other end and then I adjusted the camera and then you had to get back exactly because have my because it's like the thing got Slimmer this way yeah it was so uncomfortable on that side yeah so then I had to do it again and I almost got stuck again like what was going through your head when you were watching it Mike this was the first time he like panicked during the whole situation yeah we got really scared no did you calculate how much time it would take to excavate yeah they knew that because uh I mean it was like they could get me out in under five minutes if I really needed to be I okay I started practicing with my hand on the tombstone [Laughter] I see you this feels good it feels real good yeah so any of these other ones up here you think are fake no I just thought that one I think you counting to 100. he set his sights on you he's about to start [ __ ] on you well he's like I think your [ __ ] shoes are fake or fake easy so subreddits would go crazy exposing me and I just didn't care and I thought it was the funniest thing ever that's so smart and then I wore a fake Supreme shirt in a video same thing Reddit just lost their mind and I just I just love doing it to piss him off I mean it also keeps you in the conversation even more though no it's just funny to like watch them analyze the box logo and why it's not real you also save money you don't have to buy that's true yeah I'm still terrified about this buried alive dude I'm I'm severely claustrophobic wow oh yeah severely close so the nights before I slept in a coffin in my garage to like oh you get used here yeah emo phase too so you put a little effort in so there's just this coffin in my cold ass garage and I just lay in it close it chill there for a couple hours do you like consult with people about this first that one David Blaine yeah interesting because he did a week so I was gonna do 24 hours Bear live and then I called David and I was like I'm gonna bury myself for 24 hours and he's like that's it and I said all right I'm doing it for 50 hours and that's why it's 50 hours instead of 24. yeah but did you see his dumbass balloon thing who is he to judge I mean that's pretty cool whatever the balloon oh he just flew in a balloon it was like upper he held on to balloons flew up and then popped him came down yeah it was pretty cool but yeah that's so I I had to double it because he just basically Shadow my entire existence I mean we would have been fine if you did 24 hours just the Buried Alive thing like what is the the oxygen tank malfunctioned I couldn't handle being stuck in an elevator for 24 seconds there's enough oxygen in there for five minutes yeah I guess you're right we had so we buried that cop in like five separate times we had you know David Blaine Consulting a bunch of other people Consulting I was probably safer under there than I was above ground I think that's what they told me yeah yeah I don't know if that's true the dirt on the glass and you realize it's like this much glass between you and just thousands of pounds of dirt then it's like well [ __ ] oh that's right if it eats a little bit of a crack did you hear any weird sounds so terrified I'm sure I heard tons of stuff oh but we tried to keep it upbeat and not like I was super scared so like in the video I don't think we really put that kind of stuff did that help you get less scared knowing so many people are watching if you get scared it's kind of embarrassing whatever so that kind of blocks out that no that whole time I was just like for the love of God don't crack like because all I did was stare up at that dirt and so I just saw six thousand ten thousand whatever thousand pounds of dirt the whole time for like 50 hours straight and it hurts like [ __ ] like the bottom is just wood so you're just like that in of itself is a gem like you're just like laying on wood it was it wasn't fun but you know 194 million views not that bad I would do it again yeah what was the worst one to do the one you would never do again um that's a great way let me flip through these no buried alive I do again a heartbeat that wasn't like in the grand scheme of things it wasn't too crazy uh 50 hours in solitary you can find me don't seem that bad no well after you're married that seems like a kind of a vacation yeah now you have the [ __ ] Goofy Goobers over here torturing you and they won't let me sleep or do anything uh okay no Carl what's the hard one there's what I I say all the time but I'm just drawing blank well it's not counted before I was nice maybe yes I spent 25 hours a night that was miserable I you couldn't pay me to do that anymore what do you mean we just built a house that ice and I just spent 24 hours in it were you wearing something they would like pants like this and like a short sleeve shirt it was brutal I was like shivering all night it was one of those ones like 10 hours in I was like I'm too invested to quit but currently wouldn't do it that was like Peak grind me where I was like you know I'll do things as long as you know I'm not putting my life in danger like which we had man that's the widest thing you've done really love not being cold it's like a thing I've noticed is why people walk around yeah yeah let's go yeah that that's your whitest sitting in ice for 24 hours yeah yeah that was fruit how many views did they get uh like 100 million it kind of flopped I'm just kidding what is a flop for you now um if a video doesn't get like 50 million views it kind of sucks so but that's in English and then we dub them in other languages I love this yeah have you seen the Espanol Channel yeah yeah you should do that we yeah yeah so that one's been crushing we just hit 20 million you know what's weird is I bet people already were doing that for your videos yeah they were especially in like Japan for some reason yeah people used to upload their videos like crazy and they get millions of views yeah yeah so then that's why we just started doing it but the way that you guys do it is smart where you get the actors that are known the exactly well there's a huge secondary market for Mr Beast videos so like we'd come up with an original idea whatever like I don't know press this button 100 Grand and then the next day you'd see people on Spanish-speaking communities Japan Russia all over the world do the exact same video so part of this as well like everyone would just rip off our videos around the world because that was like a huge strategy like people at all these countries or just see who can copy our English videos first in their country and now that we do this like the rate of that has decreased a lot wow I wonder fake Supreme t-shirt exactly yeah exactly if people do that with our stand-up oh 100 they do There's a comic I'll leave his name out but um it was like huge in France and apparently he was just using Seinfeld's material I'm talking about oh but I'll tell you after I think he was just like using Seinfeld's material and then they became friends really yeah because Seinfeld is such a [ __ ] Maniac he was like this guy's got great taste like if he's gonna if he's gonna steal something he steals from the best and then they became buddies but he was like a huge comic there how crazy is that I've never heard Seinfeld I love Utah no no no I love you dude yeah that's the best thing you've said on this whole podcast do you know who he is even well I know because you got Tariq talks about comedians all the time yeah but but you but whatever right no he's a non-factor right like explain like to me like like a non I'm pretty he's in um he has a show that's that's on no no but no no he does I know you're [ __ ] with me you don't know how much you hate Seinfeld yeah yeah yeah I don't hate him but I just think he's whatever but the fact that the fact that you don't even know keep going about this like talk me through this like what are you feeling about emotionally retention through the roof right now this is going okay guys just like Drake talks about him and that's about it but he has a show or like what is this thing like isn't it I think I'm gonna sound dumb isn't it like Better Call Saul or something like that or no yes yes what is wait the show is Seinfeld yeah okay gotcha but that's okay his show is actually called Breaking Bad yeah yeah yeah yeah but go on go on go on but yeah okay yeah no Andrew I need you to ask him about movies he's never seen an entire movie in his one movie in his entire life I grew up on YouTube this guy's never seen movies yeah it was because he was homeschooled this was different with you right uh yeah no I just thought it was waste did you have chickenpox as a kid oh my gosh probably you just had shingles like a couple months ago so that means shingles means you've had chickenpox oh yeah it's the same virus though yeah yeah so there you go yes Mark just had chickenpox at the ripe age of 25 years old who are you to talk what are you talking about a compromised immune system I know same same way oh really no it's Crohn's oh you got Crohn's yeah can you eat your Burgers uh yeah those are fine it's mostly just I don't know I'm just so heavily medicated it's like in remission right now but if I wasn't on medicine it would be different oh what type of meds uh Remicade not that anyone knows what that is you ever do a Remicade at a party one time no but if you ever tried a Tesla ecstasy pill because that's [ __ ] amazing are you public about doing drugs dude love them literally I was like yeah I'm on my way over he's like is it like an X that's what is it ecstasy Etsy that's where people make [ __ ] you drugs yeah I'm a Christian boy I don't do drugs he's like okay okay I didn't know if you were [ __ ] with me or not because like you'd also like he's going back and forth with like being very sarcastic and then like very serious in the text so I have no [ __ ] we've never spoken on the phone before at all and like so we're on the phone we're on the group text with Tariq and he's like listen we need to kick Tariq out of the room immediately after he comes here I go okay that's fine and then he messaged me on the side he goes I would like to talk to you privately but the joke was that Tariq just loves you guys and so I was all that stupid [ __ ] I was saying and there was to embarrass him because he is he cringing in the back of the car and I remember so I just say some dumb [ __ ] to you like yeah I don't [ __ ] care or whatever and then I just looked back and he's just like hey hey you're a good guy dude Tark you're a good guy hey thank you and we're gonna pronounce your name right every single time yeah okay appreciate it guys appreciate it 100 you are a good Christian boy though is it true that your old YouTube Banner used to be like a Bible verse it did I used to go to a Christian School back in the day oh yeah but now it's like it's just kind of hard to tell what's right or what's wrong like religion wise there's so many and I don't know I believe there is some kind of God but how do you know damn Mark just got so sorry right [Laughter] because he's such a [ __ ] Catholic oh is that why you donate to the Catholic Church yeah yeah he bullish you no he calls that my paycheck that's what it is yeah yeah he gives me money hey I have his Revenue up here I mean he could probably make some more donations I think so donations right but for so so have your feelings changed since tark's been around or like has he are you expanding the caliph oh my gosh Jesus it is admirable to see how devoted he is though yeah like he doesn't he doesn't drink he doesn't do anything he he's actually he's not one of those people that just preach it he actually follows it sometimes it does make me go like damn like there's something there like he really cares a lot you know it's easier we're busy guys okay five times a day he gets his five minutes I'm just saying this guy Titanic have you seen it no I haven't seen it at all was it that before I was born before I was 18 I didn't even listen to music because I was like this is a waste time I should watch more YouTube I'm an idiot are you like a I'm not even are you like on a spectrum of some kind probably a little bit I've never gotten tested but it's just like if you want to make great YouTube videos you just watch YouTube so like a two hour movie you can watch like 20 YouTube videos and you get exponentially smarter doing that you know Mark just Wikipedia's movies so he knows what happens and then uses codes from them you know I actually thought about paying someone to like just give me a synopsis of all the biggest movies because like I have never watched Harry Potter or Star Wars or any of it and the amount of times in my life people just you know are like what you've never seen it yeah like it's it used to be funny now it's getting to the point where it's like it's kind of sad so you didn't even watch squid game uh no that I did watch before we filmed it of course and then after watching it were you like wow this is fun yeah we should recreate it but in general we're like whoa like TV shows are cool there's a feeling you can get from a long form series it's really good this is the thing where people misconstrue I don't think movies are bad I just think I want to be the greatest YouTuber to ever live and so like I should just focus on my thing you know I think you've achieved that already uh yeah which is why now I do watch a little bit more let me ask you that about being the greatest YouTube ever what's next because I was listening to your Rogan and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president I know I'll say that'd be fun is that something you've thought about yeah the only thing political aspirations um uh yeah I I would love to I just feel like you have to do a lot of politics leading up to it and I don't know like if you could just go from you know no one ever has done this just being a celebrity to just being president that would be great but if I have to like work my way up and be like a bear I think we've realized you don't have to yeah it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really yeah that'd be bro if I'm telling you if I was if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just give away every penny literally zero dollars for my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing like you're voting for me yeah I like I have 10 billion dollars give away every penny can't be bought because I you know I gave all my money and then I just do what's best for people and I like this yeah and just ignore lobbyists or whatever I like but you need to keep money in order to ignore the lobbyists because otherwise no I give it all away and we're good well there's freedom and I get 400 Grand a year of this President I'm good oh yeah you can live off that 100 and the taxpayers yeah dude I like this I think that I hear you I think if I wanted to like 24 right now yeah so it didn't feel okay yeah it'd be like three more Cycles but I wouldn't do I'd probably do it in my mid-40s yeah yeah I think I could make it interesting enough where I could win okay well how what give away all my money and just like you know I know how to give people's attention I can't say too much because I don't regret it in the future I think yeah I'll just trick all the [ __ ] idiots and before you do that PornHub would you take over that oh my God I would like to do the thumbnails and you know just boost the CTR yeah more saturation yeah you said uh I bought YouTube early on in the interview you said this is what I'm gonna do for the next 10 years of my life you have it's 10 years you're doing YouTube and then what you said a very specific number yeah um well I don't know it just kind of depends how things go like if we have thousands of Beast burgers and feastables go as well when we start mobile game company and other stuff like that I don't know there might just be a world where I run those companies uh yeah it's just let me just see it what do you like what do you like better you like creating or running the companies I love creating and I also it's weird I like both but you like running the companies yeah I do it's a lot of fun it's like being like it's much easier to run a burger joint than to have to like break the internet every week you know I made our to run feastfuls you know I mean because you just get a kick-ass team and you just kind of like Point them in the right direction whereas like this is like I gotta do just crazy [ __ ] that's never thought of and it's a coin flip and you don't even really know of people who care yeah you gotta do that every week and it's all got to be me yeah all sitting around me every week forever yeah um but I enjoy both I think like yeah um like we just opened up our first physical piece Burger which is crushing it um that one's doing like 30 000 a day right now wow and then feastables is in every Walmart now and that's crushing it so it's it's interesting I I'm so impressed by your ability to scale I think that's the toughest thing for a Creator scale like scale your business so like hire a team train that team yes to do those roles so that you can create more time for yourself yeah and I think that's like an unbelievably difficult thing like for me I find it incredibly different I often find like I'm the bottleneck for the things that we're doing 100 and that's not to say that all these guys aren't unbelievably talented and better than me in every single thing that they do yeah but a lot of times it might come down to a decision I have to make and then all of a sudden we're Limited in an output 100 and yeah I'm just like the way you should see it yeah is like you know if hypothetically like for creating content you have like the making the video having the production the editing camera work or whatever writing stuff like even if you split your time evenly you can only put 25 of your time to each whereas like an editor can put 100 of their time into it so like even if they're the same skill level as you they're just gonna [ __ ] on you because they have more time same with the camera guy or writer or whatever and so I think that's where a lot of people just don't realize like they're like well this person isn't as great is me or I can make better decisions yeah but you know 25 is generous so you can probably spend like 10 20 times more time than you can doing it yeah and so due to the sheer extra time they're gonna [ __ ] on you at that job or they [ __ ] on you mean just do it way better just do it better because they have more time yeah yeah like if I had to edit a video you know I just I'd have to put in literally one 100th the amount of time you know what I mean so they should be able to do better tricks should be a better cameraman than me because he could study it 30 000 times more than me now did you find initially I think this was our issue as we were starting to grow we've tried to rectify a bit but like uh that you were hiring people who could do a bunch of things when did you start getting specific in your hires um almost right away that's smart yeah yeah because I feel like what we did is like everybody did a little of everything and then it's hard to [ __ ] scale because we're all doing a little we're trying to pay less salary quite frankly oh really I mean one guy you can hire to do everything no no no I'm not a Chiefs game did you hear me beat Netflix with this special so so you immediately knew you're like okay just need these guys camera these guys editing yeah 100 yeah because you wouldn't hire a guy that box your floors to edit a video obviously yeah yeah we didn't do that we didn't do that we got the guys to edits him off the floor you understand absolutely literally yeah literally yeah yeah no yeah it is crazy thanks like because our main channel is killing it the gaming channel is killing it all it's it's wild part of the process makes you the most like gives you the most dopamine 100 uploading the video seeing like the real time in like the first five hours it gets like five million views it feels so great that's my favorite I always tell them my my favorite part of the day we drop an episode or like we drop a clip I go to the gym right when it drops I'm working out listening to tribal music watch like just refreshing YouTube studio and then you see it hit one and you're like oh what's that drug I imagine that's what it feels like Tesla it's the closest thing it's the closest thing it's so funny exactly that's that's my version yeah he still said Tesla was better because he said that's the closest thing well yeah I mean opposed to like artificially implanting your brains with chemicals yeah the closest the sand is like the the artificial hunt you know what I mean that's what it is yeah seeing the number just go up minute over a minute yeah back in the jungle I'm working out I'm running I'm on the treadmill trying to get the food and all of a sudden the views go up ugh the best best thing ever now is it equally painful if it doesn't do well no at this point are you like unattached to yeah you just look well because why what me getting depressed doesn't do anything you just look at it could should we change the thumbnail change it doesn't work better okay look at the retention graph why did it too bad take some notes move on you know what I mean like being super emotional over it doesn't really do anything it's usually uh which I used to be like if I had a bad video you would know like I'm like I would literally like cry you know especially when like I was betting the farm on every video like that's it you know then it was like [ __ ] like you know I can't pay Tariq if this doesn't do well wait did you ever have a week like that uh yeah but I would just take out a loan and then the next video all right we're gonna spend a little less guys um but now that we're like not as Reckless it's like yeah it's a lot easier to not care as much so you took out a loan to make the next video so yeah you went like uh yeah there was one month where I had to take | good job your parents loved you when you're younger okay you don't no one's an elf did you just call me an elf it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice [Applause] should we fake your death he's trying to tear this whole thing apart like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga um like is there any steaks I said shakes or steaks what's up everybody and welcome to flagrant and today we are joined by Mr b6000 yeah it's funny because I don't have that name anymore wait why don't you have it did you abort it or something oh my God this is a great one uh yes welcome to flagrant I'm here because I had nothing better to do good that's the best reason to be here and uh and we're happy about it and we're just hoping that by the end of this episode I make the same amount of money as I did coming into the episode yeah I mean ideally but I'll just take the same fair enough you know we just don't lose a brand I mean you actually operate at a loss though based on your Rogan so we can do that oh yeah we can do that no problem that's true yeah but that's why if it dips it's a bigger loss you have the most brilliant way of saying that | 8 | 6 | 4 | good job your parents loved you when you're younger okay you don't no one's an elf did you just call me an elf | it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice | 5,2,-2 | 8,1,4 | 5 | 2 | -2 | 8 | 1 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGrk7Mzm4uo | 13,469 | WGrk7Mzm4uo | 2022-09-27 00:00:00 | I know all about YouTube analytics do you want me to help you with that I could use the help that's you yeah are you logged into the show's channel oh [ __ ] yeah hold on hold on hold on uh oh God that one was uh no the mile highs I was going to Antarctica a billion dollars if we could own the channel and the companies and stuff like that like that sounds enticing but but you've been offered a billion dollars for your YouTube channel with all the companies yeah what's different about the squid game video what did you tap into I I most spent like two million dollars on a video up to that point that one we spent 4.2 million that Sky up there is not real starting at the end of the blue is all CGI yeah all CGI and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president is that something you thought about it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just gave away every penny well there's literally zero dollars in my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing and then I just do what's best for people I like this yeah [Music] we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy good job your parents loved you when you're younger okay you don't no one's an elf did you just call me an elf it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice [Applause] should we fake your death he's trying to tear this whole thing apart like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga um like is there any steaks I said shakes or steaks what's up everybody and welcome to flagrant and today we are joined by Mr b6000 yeah it's funny because I don't have that name anymore wait why don't you have it did you abort it or something oh my God this is a great one uh yes welcome to flagrant I'm here because I had nothing better to do good that's the best reason to be here and uh and we're happy about it and we're just hoping that by the end of this episode I make the same amount of money as I did coming into the episode yeah I mean ideally but I'll just take the same fair enough you know we just don't lose a brand I mean you actually operate at a loss though based on your Rogan so we can do that oh yeah we can do that no problem that's true yeah but that's why if it dips it's a bigger loss you have the most brilliant way of saying that you make lots of money I agree but how no you say I make all this money and then you're like but I spend it all yeah but you still get to say that you make it yeah yeah so no one can really [ __ ] with you when it comes to making the money well I don't spend the money that's to you know for that reason but I guess that is true yeah if it does make it easier when people are like do you make a couple million a month like yeah because I just spend it all so it does make it exactly because if I did it if I was like oh yeah just make a couple million and that was the end then I just seemed like a douchebag exactly yes I do agree but I never really thought about it that way I did thank you you're like Adam Sandler in that way it's not like a multi-millionaire but you're like one of the guys still oh I like them like usually like really rich people you know we want to eat them yeah they buy speedsters and uh yeah and mansions and go on vacations to them all fees twice watches yeah and watches yeah yeah it's a replica right gambling degenerative are you one of the rich people they want to eat are you I'm not that rich not yet you are way more Rich than me uh but I I give my money away I'm poor yeah I give my money to my wife so what's your matter I feel like your fiscal policy is going to completely change once you get yeah yeah yeah yeah just giving away stuff all the time like yeah do more reaction videos from the kitchen yeah that's the reason is there a uh Mrs Beast there is we've only been dating like six months okay my boy how long have you been married don't do that it's media training yeah that was very good uh I've been married since the 18th of December no no December 18th I got married right decision really yes I recommend you do it and you don't need a place because you don't make any money okay did you get one did I get a prenup yeah she got me gonna regret that whatever something happens I know at least like three people who got one and I was friends with them when they got married and then like two of them you know didn't work out and every single one it's just interesting to see it go from like yeah we'll be together forever to like [ __ ] this is the worst decision of my life did you did you think about giving them some money uh because that'd be a great video this money yeah yeah just helping my friend who just got divorced tell you know the people at our food banks like less money this month gotta help my divorce they would actually get it they'd be like yeah they probably would he needs it he's probably waiting in line next to them yeah yeah is one of your friends that got divorced here uh no definitely not these 18 year olds no children Tara could have a child bride or something like that no not exactly sure [Laughter] um now you brought your son here bring your kids to work day yeah yeah now is that uncomfortable at all for you about to have my kids here yeah no and bring them back to work this is getting so uncomfortable we just wanted to give Carl a shout out we love Carl we're Big Carl fans here okay so you make millions and millions and millions of dollars who cares right yeah sure I make money because it's so much money you make just tons I don't know what to do with it you don't even know what to do with it no greed okay we don't I don't know okay but that's the fun thing yeah so it's just so much [ __ ] money okay and then you're giving it away constantly yep right and then More's coming in yeah and giving it away it's basically what I did like we I just had this Theory what well hopefully the Ponzi scheme never implodes got you like you know positive schemes are great up until they just go bust but no I had this idea when I was like 18 I was like when I made a couple thousand dollars a month I was like What if I just give it away and just try to make a little bit more than a couple thousand and then I just was like oh that worked and then I did it again yeah and I've done it every month ever since and I'm just like oh well it just works and it's like a couple Grand turned into 10 turned into 100 turn in a million it just keeps going up and I'm like oh now when when you ever did like the challenges where you're giving away to your guys if they win yeah were you ever worried that you would make them not really want to work that should be stimulus no no uh no especially when we were doing a lot they act different when they make like 150 grams yeah we're doing a lot of them hey they were like 10 grand or 20 grand and this was like Chris just left his job at Best Buy Tariq literally got I tried to hire Teri and he said no and then he went to work at a hospital then a year later he's like I'm depressed and I was like come on over most of them though like were just new and had like no money so like back then when they were fighting those challenges like that was like basically at the time so that's why uh but yeah you do see as time went on they didn't go as long the challenges and that's when obviously we transitioned to people like random people like at the start I wouldn't hook the boys up and then once they were good we're like okay let's start doing we can just start doing other people okay talk about hooking up uh when you're on Rogan you no no no you you brought up the fact that when you posted your first video it was when you got hacked playing uh Pirates battle pirates yeah whatever yeah have you found out who did it no I didn't but I should have they not reached out how would they Mr b6000 is their username right yes what are they gonna tweet me on Twitter like yeah you can do a YouTube video about it I'm Olivia's highest viewed video okay because because the story don't tell the story about like all of five people listening we're gonna [ __ ] the algorithm up already yeah you did [ __ ] your attention you know what um it's fine you know if you don't want this to your views that's up to you so um you're his son you're so true he starts this off with like oh by the way Joe Rogan got 10 million views and you know what goes through my head when he says I was like well it's completely up to the topics you bring up on whether or not we do it no I mean if this gets like a 40 minute retention we're passing that if this is like 25 minutes we're screwed yeah yeah so now we're down there okay so make this story I guess you know it gives a [ __ ] about a guy that hacked me when I was 11 years old on Facebook [ __ ] them our audience is actually uh older than 17. so why don't you go ahead they're insistent okay so when I was 11 I was playing the game a guy just started just destroying me absolutely crushing me every day he had to come through and attack my face and I got pissed so I made a video saying [ __ ] this guy although why there was no words I didn't know how to record audio I was stupid but it was just like him I just sent it to the devs and I uploaded it to YouTube and then it somehow got 20 000 views first video ever gets twenty thousand that's crazy because people who played the game would just watch it but they were trying to figure out how to hack and then like all the comments were like oh so there's a guy out there that's responsible for you posting on YouTube yeah for making pissing me off when I was 11 and then inadvertently making me make a video and he could be listening right now what do you want to say to that guy um thanks for making me Rich he needs a royalty name something I found out who he is would you break him off with a little something yeah of course I give him a couple thousand dollars what do you mean couple thousand that's at least a million right yeah no get him on it dude [ __ ] that guy oh you want to play Pirates now watch this that's a great question when when you're buried alive like do you guys ever think about like him being mean as a boss oh tell them your plan for if you die oh yeah they want me to die oh yeah 100 great video big time they do because the second I died yeah um Carl Chandler Chris the three guys Nolan maybe he's a little newer we haven't decided if he partakes yet or not yeah uh they all put their hand in my Tombstone last take it off gets the channel Everything 100 everything oh what about it dude you just left the brown guy out of this he's not on care he's the camera guy so like most people haven't seen him I mean I don't know what do you think Tariq gets to put his hand on the tombstone yes I think so as of right now it's just written in the like little plan it's just those three we have to update it and put Nolan and maybe Tariq in it yes it's like because we have a little gameplay so you know they can film the video yeah that is happening mark my words I don't even know if I've really said it publicly I tweeted it one time but I'm serious I don't give a [ __ ] how much you guys are cry right put their [ __ ] hands on the tombstone and give the channel to whoever wins okay and don't bully them for it they're just doing what I want and and you guys think you could do without him right like an interesting experiment I'm down should we fake your death dude oh [ __ ] no just like I want to do this the next 10 years and if I do that then like if I fake that did I pick count to 100 000. good point good point you can't take anything okay uh hold on real quick real quick most illegal go for it no uh most illegal video honestly I try to brainstorm legal videos so yeah that's probably a better use of your time okay um what about what about like a competition like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay is that the notepad you're flipping yeah yeah yeah yeah go ahead rip it up three that I for the podcast he's just slide through okay um this is a good tell me if you think this has good one retention and good like uh click through okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga that could work um like is there any steaks say again like anything on the line uh I said shakes or steaks I just got Invisalign all right my s's are not gonna come off correctly like maybe if it's like losers car gets hit by a meteor or something that's a good one that's good I like that okay oh okay wait a hundred kids go to an island last one leaves gets an internship with Jeffrey Epstein thoughts right he's dead or is he I haven't seen the body um yeah it's a banger that's right I don't know but yeah for the right reasons but you know get clicks it's probably by the FBI okay you were investigated by the FBI was that well that's what we're wondering oh no I was hunted by them for a video were they really hunting someone else in your crew you want to inform me do you know something I don't I think we know who he's looking at I don't know he's looking at Carl I was looking at Carl I was looking at Carl's dad and nobody else hey hey bro I'm gonna need you to respect Tariq yeah I do okay all right I'm gonna have to walk up yeah yeah you respect to people were spectators one trillion dollars I give you right now uh okay I have to spend it on the video okay what is it uh I bought everything I wanted in life and I just buy everything everything I don't think I get you to a trillion dog I'm gonna be honest now humans are expensive bro like oh I can figure it out people are like you couldn't spend a billion a day if you wanted to [ __ ] 10 super Yachts problem solved I could I could spend a trillion okay I'm just calling up like people who own neighborhoods buying entire neighborhoods you know wow I could figure it out one trillion you buy everything you want in life yeah I would just literally buy like half of America why not have you look into buying a planet uh uh no I mean like they're so far away you know how much cooler it is if planets weren't like 500 000 light years away there's like a realistic way we could visit them in our life yeah I feel like we'd all be way happier yeah yeah we'll just get out of here for a little bit it won't just stress Our Lives it's more fun yeah yeah but it's like you have to like build a ship and send it off and people have to have kids on it and kids and their kids will maybe see that planet it's kind of lame yeah yeah thing I mean that's what your boy's trying to do at least yeah Elon yeah yeah my boy did you believe him when he made that offer what offer if something bad happens to him oh on Twitter I love dude you did your research you think that you're gonna come on this bro my journalistic Integrity oh yeah he thinks he's a journalist but I'm a journalist bro really yeah well then you need to make up some lies that sounds good yeah yeah well first he has to buy it and then yeah I'm very confident if he bought it and died he'd give it to me totally and not the ambassadors that have tens of billions of dollars in it hmm that's a bad enemy to make though I wouldn't have made that deal with you what that oh if I I own Twitter if I die if I die then you get it the guy that is making videos and doing crazy could you imagine someone assassinates him but then like the holy motive I wonder who it could be okay and then they just want to assassinate him yeah they get a [ __ ] YouTube channel but what would you even do with Twitter I mean I don't know sell it's worth a lot of money Give It Away give it give it to a subscribers get some money oh no you stop being poor help him okay because he doesn't need help he he doesn't believe in philanthropy oh no I do believe no no you don't believe in places we've talked about this word on the streets you hate plenty I don't hate it I believe in it um what do you donate to say again we've talked about this a million I donated to Catholic Church I donated sperm for like the first maybe like no it's not three years [Laughter] I believe in philanthropy you've literally never done it I do believe in it he believes in it as an idea he just hasn't gotten around to it no I think I believe when you do it I think you do it yeah yeah wait I believe it you believe him I believe people do it what do you mean I don't know can I believe it and also not do it look I'm saying Jimmy donates millions of dollars every year he plants trees yeah he helps people yes food pantries yeah and you also have a lump of money yeah that you could use to help other people and why don't you um I I feel like you're doing a good job like if everybody what if I have a burger and I have chocolate and I'm giving everybody money and I'm giving everybody Islands you know what I mean your changes how many [ __ ] white oprahs do we need there we go I should give more man yeah agreed why why when did you start giving when I was like 15. oh you started young yeah that's the problem The Habit has been built yeah yeah exactly we're too old to start we got money ladies yeah yeah perfectly logical reason more importantly yeah everyone always talks about obviously you yo yo yo can you stop bullying us no He's a Bully but I love it this guy's a bully dude yeah yeah bro you're a [ __ ] on his side well I'm just saying I didn't realize son of a [ __ ] did you realize he's taller than you two he's the bullet everyone how tall are you wow all right okay your Netflix special that you you know sold on your own and you made more than they would have paid you yeah have you ever was with Netflix but yeah yeah have you ever like said how much money was publicly or anything like that no I haven't do you ever plan on it just every time I hear it I'm always curious like even on the car right over I like was thinking about I was like uh just how much did you [ __ ] on Netflix you know well this guy's good it's not I didn't say it was Netflix Oh wait really yeah I thought that was the whole thing everybody found it was Netflix I never said which one it is he's never revealed that bro I was beyond certain it was Netflix I don't [ __ ] know because he looks at the stock market Netflix is like here's a three million bang yeah delete some jokes and you're like [ __ ] you and then you made like 20 million and you just shat on them I didn't make 20 million yeah obviously that was just the number I put on my head but yeah what's happening yeah if I want bro do you plan on telling us how badly you should on said streaming service I I plan on just taking a moment [ __ ] an [ __ ] dude you just threw out 20 like it was nothing bro I apologize yeah I'm gonna talk [ __ ] man that's it now I'm putting it on YouTube because you said that what the number I'm gonna put the whole special on YouTube there and he's gonna donate his money and I'm gonna donate the money hold on to it hold on to it I'm gonna donate to who you said I'm gonna donate it to me and my wife I'm gonna donate to us and then when you get a divorce you'll get half of it [ __ ] [Laughter] [Laughter] any other [ __ ] questions no but I want that story we were talking about beforehand yeah about the yeah so when he was uh going through video ideas it reminded me of someone who just I can't remember if it was Dubai or somewhere in the Middle East this guy hired a private investigator in North Carolina I have no context to find me um and this is just something that happens yeah someone this happens a lot so whenever people call local private investigators they just let us know because a lot of people just want to know where I am for whatever reason oh the private investigators call you directly yeah it's usually which now I'm giving away my secrets but oh well I'm In Too Deep but yeah um so he calls us lets us know he's like this time it's someone from like Dubai we don't really know what he wants but he's just flying to North Carolina tomorrow and he just paid me to find you and we're like okay cool um and so then the next day he gets there and then with the private I have security somebody's security woman to private investigator to meet him and my Security's just like why the [ __ ] are you here why are you trying to find Jimmy and the guy's like I just have video ideas I really want to give them and my security is like [ __ ] you why are you actually here he's he just kept saying it like 30 times in a row he's just like I just want to give him the sheet of ideas so it's just a piece of paper with video ideas flies across the world private investigator everything instead of like we don't believe you and so they like he let them my security search his hotel room couldn't find anything nothing in there just a suitcase of clothes um and he's just literally just did all that to give me a list of ideas and then and then well my security was like oh Jimmy's out of town for three months did you ever get the [ __ ] yeah well then just get took it I was like I'll give it to Jimmy and then he gave it to me and it was just like it was like open up a free gas station like open that's actually that's a very Middle Eastern idea yeah he's trying to make money off you it was like 30 ideas like that and I was just like this is actually a lot of women read in public or something like that we we did get squid game out of that [ __ ] yeah [ __ ] I sold a guy from Dubai's idea this is before the real squid game that's the game yeah no he wrote it all out yeah this guy just hired private investigators flew down there all this muddy camped out just to give me a list of video ideas and none of them were good none of them were good I got I got plenty of ideas yeah yeah I need ideas give me the Dubai ideas it's much easier to fly here at the North Carolina do you have a lot of people uh doing that like uh just okay you hear the stories of people going like I risk everything to be here like I saw Carl's story of like I spent my last dollar and then I ended up working out and that kind of inspires every lunatic to take their last dollar yeah to just show up I just I live in my studio now yeah so it's like fin stand and stuff that's and most people know that so they don't but sometimes you know the gym in the bedroom but sometimes I'll go out and they'll just be like yeah this guy's just been camping behind a gas station for like a month waiting to see you and I'm like lovely and how do you say I just like tell him I'm just not interested like that's not how you know I like to meet people but that's still like occasionally happens and it's always like that never pissed them off because you're not like I mean that's not the nicest I'm not I don't think anyone expects me to just go and be people who just can't battle wait for my attention because you don't know like they might be trying to kill me they might be whatever yeah so it used to be it's weird I like hostiles sometimes it's like a lot and then sometimes it's not as much yeah have you ever had a dangerous moment like with your security where they had to intervene and like get someone off you um dangerous car can you think of one uh not really no nobody cares enough yeah you know Baxter's ever a crowd of five people is it ever women waiting to see okay Mr Beast no I usually um no but we've never had any like crazy issues it's actually kind of weird like with the mall one like that went really well even though like crazy yeah at one point there's like 20 000 people in there yeah and girls showing tits and [ __ ] these are jokes these are videos these are children really they're screenshots in the video of like of girls like flashing I hope not yeah no that was nuts it was crazy yeah and they had like the the American flag like pasties or whatever like that this is not true you didn't see this it's on it's there was a whole quibby series that they made about is that what it was nope turn the phone when within five seconds of using quibby I want to watch the show and I was like this is garbage I went to screenshot and the screenshot was black yeah and that's how I knew it would fail because you can't make memes they made it where you couldn't take screenshots of anything Netflix's problem too yeah well at least Netflix like you can watch it on your computer and it's easier to screenshot yeah clivia was phone only and there's zero way to take a screenshot okay so it's like how the [ __ ] do you expect these shows to go viral yeah like that was the same time of baby Yoda and all this stuff and then quibby's just like no no memes yeah and it's like no one's ripping your [ __ ] shows can you explain that a little bit more about how like memes Drive the culture of 100 yeah like the Mandalorian you get rid of baby Yoda memes it's like nobody even talks about it exactly I I never would watch it now when you're creating videos here you also going like what do you think will be memeable in this uh I probably should but no but no yeah right now I'm just film and TV like film TV it's what is memeable no not only it's just it's just something that happens naturally if you're just kidding or no one can take screenshots and you're just an idiot you know I mean because that's how you just get attention on Twitter it's like cutting one of your legs out for money yeah if you try to make a meme then your cringe like memes just happen yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you mean like if you're the creator of the TV show like The House of dragons is going this is the memeable moment exactly you I don't think you can ever do that you can't force them you can embrace it though after it's like organically possible lean in yeah yeah I think you have to yeah that like what is that movie morbius or whatever yeah movie that got absolutely destroyed yeah did you see there but it still did well right I don't know I'm pretty sure like the destroying it caused it to they put it back out in theaters oh really it went viral as like a meme and they're like we're re-releasing it opinion says well with the like people actually I was enjoyed though yeah you did that you did yeah we did we bought every ticket in a theater and then we just flooded with people in suits oh it's amazing it's great and I heard they made that [ __ ] illegal yeah like they did a few places yeah it's like for the first seven three years I go to a movie theater and then like three days later it's like no you can't do that also like uh the most mature way to dress yeah right yeah it has a very cultish feel to it though just a bunch of young white kids in suits and whatever yo yeah this is scary you're saying if there's like a bunch of white people all dressed the same you would like to make you feel uncomfortable a little bit I wonder if I walked in and it was just a hundred black people in suits how I would feel yeah Men In Black because I think the New Mexico Studios what's going on yeah that is wild I don't know why that is concerning it shouldn't be illegal but it does make you literally because some of them started lighting firecrackers in the movie theater and one of them like blew up a couple seats I told you man it's a dangerous thing you can't trust that many white people just the same why we get out of it we get out of hand you get yeah you get one group thinking it's just a it's just a mob also yeah yeah but it is fun see me and then we break it up so it's not too much white boy [ __ ] going on yeah yeah so every time Mark and I are starting to get hyped about things yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not good that's actually a really good idea that's why fatic is a part of the team so that's it gotcha too much fun he's not good we keep his camera off he's like Sid Vicious we don't even use it yeah you're content made it but just in case you guys start going you want to go to Charlottesville he's like everybody chill out this is very important that's how you build your team oh that's smart Teresa Foundation right yes okay this is good are they allowed to have girlfriends is the team allowed to have girlfriends I wish not but you know if they want to are they just drowning in strange or what oh my gosh let's cut over time boy [Laughter] dude okay girl I didn't know you had it like that my voice [Music] [Laughter] Nola's got a little something going on I know 100 right chain out by the way yeah oh I love it some wild [ __ ] boys you got over here oh [ __ ] crazy again what are you guys do on a Saturday like split a six-pack of white claws dude all right well I don't I just work all the time yeah yeah so I usually see them when we're filming but outside that I don't see them too much anymore okay how do you split the work balance with your girl you've introduced this relationship in last time yeah that's what US married guys want to know yeah I got you guys the answers you've been needing she's actually from South Africa so she can only come here 90 days a year anyways so it just naturally Works itself out [Music] African-American uh I'm working on it a white woman and African-American oh there's your video wedding episode it is a little weird that like like she makes good money she's like gone to college multiple degrees everything you would want you would want her here yeah but I still feel like there's just literally no way to get her in America like you why don't we like reform our immigration process we're like yeah we should let in the good ones right who said that why are you making it bad why are you making it bad you're twisting I don't want my girlfriend you've been doing this to him for an hour okay um but you can marry her and then she's in yeah I'll just marry her yeah that seems like a reasonable way you could actually have Nolan do it no one could marry your guy it would be a great video is that like a company could I just pay someone to marry her yeah yeah really is that like it's not a company but no one can do it are you thinking about I don't know what like if she has to marry someone I see on it you know this is a little bit but if it doesn't do anything but it feels just like some guy that I'll never see again and they just like marry so she can move here like but he might try something no no one's an elf look at that like he's not gonna do anything yeah but the problem is no one will make fun of me but the thing is because there's a lot of the Rings call me an elf yeah [Music] it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice it's a compliment cookies in a tree that's what he's saying no Lord of the Rings bro I've seen Lord of the Rings I just don't know what I look like you know the people that you're like my family no no not your ears your [ __ ] head and your skin and your yes your beauty [Laughter] married to my girlfriend maybe he's not doing nothing yeah but he's got that over himself no he doesn't win a single argument anymore that's it why what happened because I'm married to your girlfriend but then you can also look at that do you know who that is Legolas yes yeah yeah yeah [Laughter] wait what else do we got in here yeah yeah yeah I was surprised you're not grabbing your phone back wait you're gonna let him look him look at your photos yeah yeah yeah it can't happen no yeah okay you you guys should trade phones that'd be fun oh me and you yeah do you want to do that ah I feel like he's just gonna like go through my YouTube analytics and start blurting out numbers well I maybe that's actually a great idea actually probably he wasn't good do you want me to help you with that I I could use the help that'd be great I mean we could work on some TMS are you the behind the scenes guy no it's all it's awesome [Laughter] yeah are you logged into the show's channel yeah what are we doing right now wait hold on hold on hold on what are we doing here we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy bro no you're killing it crazy guys he's a good job I keep up the good work you know what I will not compliment you the rest yeah he's gonna give you advice and then you're gonna give him your parents loved you and you're younger you don't know someone abused this man and he just doesn't know how to take us off I'm proud of you for having two million subscribers wow and he's like what the [ __ ] did you just say I was like I'm proud wow okay Solomon over here bro yeah you could tell the accuracy by how fast we both did Jesus Christ my Dad loved me at least you know hey Mom still stepped it up a little bit so it's RPM's a little how do we get that up yeah yeah what'd he say RPM RPMs yeah I've been working on those yeah yeah you definitely I love the RPM so you swear a lot in the video say again you swear a lot in the videos I I wouldn't no you did I could tell you dude just look at the revenue I don't swear you have to I don't swear it wouldn't be this love you didn't swear racist a lot but that's not cussing gotcha do you know what I mean yeah a substitute like you know oh you're saying say things that are wrong yeah you say things that you know advertisers naughty yes but we have great advertisers the numbers it's just funny that like I could never looking for a chocolate bar sponsorship actually can we sponsor the next one yeah how do you charge an episode for you yeah free oh philanthropy thank you yeah you almost said Felicia it's only one other time okay palette of chocolate right there matter of fact we need to replace the trees we will replace it with a paddle of chocolate matter of fact matter of fact I've been wanting to try your burger let's see how fast are the Beast Burgers usually come go Mark uh uh probably 30 minutes 30 minutes well we might get them a little quicker uh what are they here is it only hamburgers or do you have anything for people who aren't going uh yeah he doesn't eat beef we have a grilled cheese oh that sounds fun I'm working on oh no we have impossible meat as well okay I forgot we launched that it's just like three percent of our sales like no one gives a [ __ ] I was like really expecting people to [ __ ] with the plant-based first we were friends you know what I mean I thought we had a thing and we just [ __ ] on him together no what this that's nothing it's just in general America just doesn't give a [ __ ] thank you yeah because I was like really hoping that would like explode and like no one cared about the impossible me yeah and we also did like lettuce wraps where you can substitute the bun for a letter that sounds great like that yeah that sounds fun when people want a burger they want a burger that's what I found out the hardware what's up guys today's episode is sponsored by surf shark surf shark is a modern VPN design with the user in mind their utilities are powered by a robust security mechanism but designed to be simple intuitive to use enjoy all the freedoms of an open internet safely and 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back to the show look at this how long have these been sitting around hold on one second because if they say these are bad it's not my fault no we got some real Beast Burgers okay this is it Mr Beast that old ass packaging oh oh God here we go wait a minute okay this is weird that looks awful like a Big Mac s Special Sauce it looks like a Big Mac dude I mean when you order we order from McDonald's cheese lettuce onions oh what is this it looked like two old beef patties mustard sauce pickles cheese lettuce I just thought it says hasn't been opened yeah so this is a Big Mac then you guys really move it off how are you going to use my card and not get an impossible Burger you can eat beef why not oh I mean it's impossible this is a beast Burger this is what happens when you hang out with comedian yes okay so these do look like Big Mac so that is a big mac oh that is yeah oh so that's what the Beast burger no you can't help your [ __ ] you but no don't know what's going on let me see this he uses ghost kitchens right oh this one though that looks more like her that's what hold on let me okay that's it hold on hold on hold on dude do you have like a do you have like a team that we could call like an HR son that's crazy because we didn't do that you did no we did not swear there's not a coincidence that the ones without the stickers are Big Macs and the ones with the stickers not opened aren't [Laughter] yeah it looks like it's been centered around a little bit but it looks good I'm gonna take a bite right now it's not my fault if it's been sitting out for an hour is there money in there oh no I'm not gonna lie I have fire it's got fries on it um that's bar hey that's Chandler so whoever's on our marketing team make an ad of him saying that and just run it all over that's fine just Target everyone within 100 mile radius of this or anyone that goes to a show just hit him with Instagram ads if I'm going that's far I think that's [ __ ] fire right there what do you rate that one out of ten burger burger review honestly down down honestly no not honestly guys while you're ready I'm honest with you right now this needs a little more sauce okay probably because it's been sitting around a little bit it's dried up oh yeah you this this the version they ordered is the one with no sauce well you don't need to throw it like that that's the old factory they need to update it they need to update that [ __ ] yeah agree [ __ ] that package agreed what's wrong with Angry Birds Packaging Patty yeah excellent I agree Patty is excellent dare I say the best you've ever had for fast food okay dude I'm an in and out Enthusiast I feel the return retention you know just give us the rating so we can love it holy [ __ ] that's reduction step it up bro miles the single please one out of ten all right you know what I'll take it if it saves the podcast it's just hardwired you can't spend a decade of your life studying how to go violent how to get people to watch the video and then have it fire bomb in front of your eyes to not like hurt your soul yeah so you think about that with everything yeah it'd be like the same as if I started doing stand up there and it was just god-awful you would be like I gotta like what about during sex do you ever be like oh my God I'm starting to look around the room a little bit like Africa would be nice to be back right now it's been more than three minutes I think we got enough RPMs so is there a collab burger or food product that we the flagrant Beast products yeah I know [Music] [Laughter] [Laughter] so Jimmy gave you some advice on your channel we'll suck less yeah um what is uh what's your advice for his channel oh number one uh plane crash video very close to 911. I intentionally made sure we did not upload in September they were like you know we might need more time I was like you don't have more time [Applause] I was like this is like we're a couple days away from September like that's so funny it's like no one gives you advice on your channel so this is gonna be a perfect tons of advice every time I upload I get like 40 phone calls from people tell me how it could be about it is there somebody you watch that you still learn a lot from on YouTube that you're like oh that guy I could learn from uh I mean everyone like even like anybody more than anyone else anybody no it changes it's just like I just like watching random Youtube videos and like even like a homeless person on the street you can learn something from like how to be more humble or what what it's like for someone who's struggling so like if you apply that same mindset to videos like every video you watch there's something you can learn especially if it has a million views like there's a reason it got a million views okay I could give you the dumb dick joke answer Alex didn't believe that you got buried oh you didn't no interesting he had a whole reason for why you didn't get buried I kind of forgot you don't just forget yourself this is the most viewed video You're questioning my existence yeah exactly I'm just saying the camera angles made it seem as though oh I could have fixed it I remember this whoa I know and I think you're you're worth too much to take that risk uh yeah my mom was like crying when I filmed this video I was like Mom I promise we did the math um let me skip to over here to show you there's a scene where the boys literally dig down and yeah see that penis sign yeah they literally dug down and put that there yeah uh so you you could have planned wait wait right here oh Carl wait wait for the cut right here look you can literally see where they put the sign there and how deep it is underground or that could have just been shot at a different time where whoa Carl is on to us what if like to Arena like Brandon here it was like hey Jimmy I need you really uncomfortable yeah okay with this video specifically okay yeah um well there's two I'm curious about for the same reason this the one where you're in the the outdoor pool and you're under underwater yeah the thing bro that was done like five years ago this yeah the headache yeah have you figured out what that was about yeah it's because uh I was an idiot back then in the like we were pumping air in but the CO2 or whatever the [ __ ] you it doesn't get pumped out yeah getting pumped out yeah so you're just inhaling your own carbon yeah and so then when I started getting a headache I was like oh [ __ ] and then dioxide yeah yeah carbon dioxide so then we like called someone who know what they're doing they're like yeah you're an idiot yeah yeah okay and I just got out immediately okay and then when you're buried under this is what we learned from it so we had a pump that was pumping in air and pumping out the old Air what was the most catastrophic thought you had while you were completely buried I uh tried there was a camera at my feet three could also talk about this too uh and I went to like go adjust it and I couldn't so I like literally turned around and I'm you know not super flexible so I literally like was going to turn and so like I'm laying like this and as I'm like Disney I got caught like halfway and I was like [ __ ] I'm [ __ ] I'm fine I was literally like guys if I can't get out of this in two seconds you start digging right the [ __ ] now because I was like cotton is super awkward position like in the thing and I just like I'm gonna give it one last try and I just pushed as hard as I could and I popped out the other end and then I adjusted the camera and then you had to get back exactly because have my because it's like the thing got Slimmer this way yeah it was so uncomfortable on that side yeah so then I had to do it again and I almost got stuck again like what was going through your head when you were watching it Mike this was the first time he like panicked during the whole situation yeah we got really scared no did you calculate how much time it would take to excavate yeah they knew that because uh I mean it was like they could get me out in under five minutes if I really needed to be I okay I started practicing with my hand on the tombstone [Laughter] I see you this feels good it feels real good yeah so any of these other ones up here you think are fake no I just thought that one I think you counting to 100. he set his sights on you he's about to start [ __ ] on you well he's like I think your [ __ ] shoes are fake or fake easy so subreddits would go crazy exposing me and I just didn't care and I thought it was the funniest thing ever that's so smart and then I wore a fake Supreme shirt in a video same thing Reddit just lost their mind and I just I just love doing it to piss him off I mean it also keeps you in the conversation even more though no it's just funny to like watch them analyze the box logo and why it's not real you also save money you don't have to buy that's true yeah I'm still terrified about this buried alive dude I'm I'm severely claustrophobic wow oh yeah severely close so the nights before I slept in a coffin in my garage to like oh you get used here yeah emo phase too so you put a little effort in so there's just this coffin in my cold ass garage and I just lay in it close it chill there for a couple hours do you like consult with people about this first that one David Blaine yeah interesting because he did a week so I was gonna do 24 hours Bear live and then I called David and I was like I'm gonna bury myself for 24 hours and he's like that's it and I said all right I'm doing it for 50 hours and that's why it's 50 hours instead of 24. yeah but did you see his dumbass balloon thing who is he to judge I mean that's pretty cool whatever the balloon oh he just flew in a balloon it was like upper he held on to balloons flew up and then popped him came down yeah it was pretty cool but yeah that's so I I had to double it because he just basically Shadow my entire existence I mean we would have been fine if you did 24 hours just the Buried Alive thing like what is the the oxygen tank malfunctioned I couldn't handle being stuck in an elevator for 24 seconds there's enough oxygen in there for five minutes yeah I guess you're right we had so we buried that cop in like five separate times we had you know David Blaine Consulting a bunch of other people Consulting I was probably safer under there than I was above ground I think that's what they told me yeah yeah I don't know if that's true the dirt on the glass and you realize it's like this much glass between you and just thousands of pounds of dirt then it's like well [ __ ] oh that's right if it eats a little bit of a crack did you hear any weird sounds so terrified I'm sure I heard tons of stuff oh but we tried to keep it upbeat and not like I was super scared so like in the video I don't think we really put that kind of stuff did that help you get less scared knowing so many people are watching if you get scared it's kind of embarrassing whatever so that kind of blocks out that no that whole time I was just like for the love of God don't crack like because all I did was stare up at that dirt and so I just saw six thousand ten thousand whatever thousand pounds of dirt the whole time for like 50 hours straight and it hurts like [ __ ] like the bottom is just wood so you're just like that in of itself is a gem like you're just like laying on wood it was it wasn't fun but you know 194 million views not that bad I would do it again yeah what was the worst one to do the one you would never do again um that's a great way let me flip through these no buried alive I do again a heartbeat that wasn't like in the grand scheme of things it wasn't too crazy uh 50 hours in solitary you can find me don't seem that bad no well after you're married that seems like a kind of a vacation yeah now you have the [ __ ] Goofy Goobers over here torturing you and they won't let me sleep or do anything uh okay no Carl what's the hard one there's what I I say all the time but I'm just drawing blank well it's not counted before I was nice maybe yes I spent 25 hours a night that was miserable I you couldn't pay me to do that anymore what do you mean we just built a house that ice and I just spent 24 hours in it were you wearing something they would like pants like this and like a short sleeve shirt it was brutal I was like shivering all night it was one of those ones like 10 hours in I was like I'm too invested to quit but currently wouldn't do it that was like Peak grind me where I was like you know I'll do things as long as you know I'm not putting my life in danger like which we had man that's the widest thing you've done really love not being cold it's like a thing I've noticed is why people walk around yeah yeah let's go yeah that that's your whitest sitting in ice for 24 hours yeah yeah that was fruit how many views did they get uh like 100 million it kind of flopped I'm just kidding what is a flop for you now um if a video doesn't get like 50 million views it kind of sucks so but that's in English and then we dub them in other languages I love this yeah have you seen the Espanol Channel yeah yeah you should do that we yeah yeah so that one's been crushing we just hit 20 million you know what's weird is I bet people already were doing that for your videos yeah they were especially in like Japan for some reason yeah people used to upload their videos like crazy and they get millions of views yeah yeah so then that's why we just started doing it but the way that you guys do it is smart where you get the actors that are known the exactly well there's a huge secondary market for Mr Beast videos so like we'd come up with an original idea whatever like I don't know press this button 100 Grand and then the next day you'd see people on Spanish-speaking communities Japan Russia all over the world do the exact same video so part of this as well like everyone would just rip off our videos around the world because that was like a huge strategy like people at all these countries or just see who can copy our English videos first in their country and now that we do this like the rate of that has decreased a lot wow I wonder fake Supreme t-shirt exactly yeah exactly if people do that with our stand-up oh 100 they do There's a comic I'll leave his name out but um it was like huge in France and apparently he was just using Seinfeld's material I'm talking about oh but I'll tell you after I think he was just like using Seinfeld's material and then they became friends really yeah because Seinfeld is such a [ __ ] Maniac he was like this guy's got great taste like if he's gonna if he's gonna steal something he steals from the best and then they became buddies but he was like a huge comic there how crazy is that I've never heard Seinfeld I love Utah no no no I love you dude yeah that's the best thing you've said on this whole podcast do you know who he is even well I know because you got Tariq talks about comedians all the time yeah but but you but whatever right no he's a non-factor right like explain like to me like like a non I'm pretty he's in um he has a show that's that's on no no but no no he does I know you're [ __ ] with me you don't know how much you hate Seinfeld yeah yeah yeah I don't hate him but I just think he's whatever but the fact that the fact that you don't even know keep going about this like talk me through this like what are you feeling about emotionally retention through the roof right now this is going okay guys just like Drake talks about him and that's about it but he has a show or like what is this thing like isn't it I think I'm gonna sound dumb isn't it like Better Call Saul or something like that or no yes yes what is wait the show is Seinfeld yeah okay gotcha but that's okay his show is actually called Breaking Bad yeah yeah yeah yeah but go on go on go on but yeah okay yeah no Andrew I need you to ask him about movies he's never seen an entire movie in his one movie in his entire life I grew up on YouTube this guy's never seen movies yeah it was because he was homeschooled this was different with you right uh yeah no I just thought it was waste did you have chickenpox as a kid oh my gosh probably you just had shingles like a couple months ago so that means shingles means you've had chickenpox oh yeah it's the same virus though yeah yeah so there you go yes Mark just had chickenpox at the ripe age of 25 years old who are you to talk what are you talking about a compromised immune system I know same same way oh really no it's Crohn's oh you got Crohn's yeah can you eat your Burgers uh yeah those are fine it's mostly just I don't know I'm just so heavily medicated it's like in remission right now but if I wasn't on medicine it would be different oh what type of meds uh Remicade not that anyone knows what that is you ever do a Remicade at a party one time no but if you ever tried a Tesla ecstasy pill because that's [ __ ] amazing are you public about doing drugs dude love them literally I was like yeah I'm on my way over he's like is it like an X that's what is it ecstasy Etsy that's where people make [ __ ] you drugs yeah I'm a Christian boy I don't do drugs he's like okay okay I didn't know if you were [ __ ] with me or not because like you'd also like he's going back and forth with like being very sarcastic and then like very serious in the text so I have no [ __ ] we've never spoken on the phone before at all and like so we're on the phone we're on the group text with Tariq and he's like listen we need to kick Tariq out of the room immediately after he comes here I go okay that's fine and then he messaged me on the side he goes I would like to talk to you privately but the joke was that Tariq just loves you guys and so I was all that stupid [ __ ] I was saying and there was to embarrass him because he is he cringing in the back of the car and I remember so I just say some dumb [ __ ] to you like yeah I don't [ __ ] care or whatever and then I just looked back and he's just like hey hey you're a good guy dude Tark you're a good guy hey thank you and we're gonna pronounce your name right every single time yeah okay appreciate it guys appreciate it 100 you are a good Christian boy though is it true that your old YouTube Banner used to be like a Bible verse it did I used to go to a Christian School back in the day oh yeah but now it's like it's just kind of hard to tell what's right or what's wrong like religion wise there's so many and I don't know I believe there is some kind of God but how do you know damn Mark just got so sorry right [Laughter] because he's such a [ __ ] Catholic oh is that why you donate to the Catholic Church yeah yeah he bullish you no he calls that my paycheck that's what it is yeah yeah he gives me money hey I have his Revenue up here I mean he could probably make some more donations I think so donations right but for so so have your feelings changed since tark's been around or like has he are you expanding the caliph oh my gosh Jesus it is admirable to see how devoted he is though yeah like he doesn't he doesn't drink he doesn't do anything he he's actually he's not one of those people that just preach it he actually follows it sometimes it does make me go like damn like there's something there like he really cares a lot you know it's easier we're busy guys okay five times a day he gets his five minutes I'm just saying this guy Titanic have you seen it no I haven't seen it at all was it that before I was born before I was 18 I didn't even listen to music because I was like this is a waste time I should watch more YouTube I'm an idiot are you like a I'm not even are you like on a spectrum of some kind probably a little bit I've never gotten tested but it's just like if you want to make great YouTube videos you just watch YouTube so like a two hour movie you can watch like 20 YouTube videos and you get exponentially smarter doing that you know Mark just Wikipedia's movies so he knows what happens and then uses codes from them you know I actually thought about paying someone to like just give me a synopsis of all the biggest movies because like I have never watched Harry Potter or Star Wars or any of it and the amount of times in my life people just you know are like what you've never seen it yeah like it's it used to be funny now it's getting to the point where it's like it's kind of sad so you didn't even watch squid game uh no that I did watch before we filmed it of course and then after watching it were you like wow this is fun yeah we should recreate it but in general we're like whoa like TV shows are cool there's a feeling you can get from a long form series it's really good this is the thing where people misconstrue I don't think movies are bad I just think I want to be the greatest YouTuber to ever live and so like I should just focus on my thing you know I think you've achieved that already uh yeah which is why now I do watch a little bit more let me ask you that about being the greatest YouTube ever what's next because I was listening to your Rogan and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president I know I'll say that'd be fun is that something you've thought about yeah the only thing political aspirations um uh yeah I I would love to I just feel like you have to do a lot of politics leading up to it and I don't know like if you could just go from you know no one ever has done this just being a celebrity to just being president that would be great but if I have to like work my way up and be like a bear I think we've realized you don't have to yeah it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really yeah that'd be bro if I'm telling you if I was if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just give away every penny literally zero dollars for my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing like you're voting for me yeah I like I have 10 billion dollars give away every penny can't be bought because I you know I gave all my money and then I just do what's best for people and I like this yeah and just ignore lobbyists or whatever I like but you need to keep money in order to ignore the lobbyists because otherwise no I give it all away and we're good well there's freedom and I get 400 Grand a year of this President I'm good oh yeah you can live off that 100 and the taxpayers yeah dude I like this I think that I hear you I think if I wanted to like 24 right now yeah so it didn't feel okay yeah it'd be like three more Cycles but I wouldn't do I'd probably do it in my mid-40s yeah yeah I think I could make it interesting enough where I could win okay well how what give away all my money and just like you know I know how to give people's attention I can't say too much because I don't regret it in the future I think yeah I'll just trick all the [ __ ] idiots and before you do that PornHub would you take over that oh my God I would like to do the thumbnails and you know just boost the CTR yeah more saturation yeah you said uh I bought YouTube early on in the interview you said this is what I'm gonna do for the next 10 years of my life you have it's 10 years you're doing YouTube and then what you said a very specific number yeah um well I don't know it just kind of depends how things go like if we have thousands of Beast burgers and feastables go as well when we start mobile game company and other stuff like that I don't know there might just be a world where I run those companies uh yeah it's just let me just see it what do you like what do you like better you like creating or running the companies I love creating and I also it's weird I like both but you like running the companies yeah I do it's a lot of fun it's like being like it's much easier to run a burger joint than to have to like break the internet every week you know I made our to run feastfuls you know I mean because you just get a kick-ass team and you just kind of like Point them in the right direction whereas like this is like I gotta do just crazy [ __ ] that's never thought of and it's a coin flip and you don't even really know of people who care yeah you gotta do that every week and it's all got to be me yeah all sitting around me every week forever yeah um but I enjoy both I think like yeah um like we just opened up our first physical piece Burger which is crushing it um that one's doing like 30 000 a day right now wow and then feastables is in every Walmart now and that's crushing it so it's it's interesting I I'm so impressed by your ability to scale I think that's the toughest thing for a Creator scale like scale your business so like hire a team train that team yes to do those roles so that you can create more time for yourself yeah and I think that's like an unbelievably difficult thing like for me I find it incredibly different I often find like I'm the bottleneck for the things that we're doing 100 and that's not to say that all these guys aren't unbelievably talented and better than me in every single thing that they do yeah but a lot of times it might come down to a decision I have to make and then all of a sudden we're Limited in an output 100 and yeah I'm just like the way you should see it yeah is like you know if hypothetically like for creating content you have like the making the video having the production the editing camera work or whatever writing stuff like even if you split your time evenly you can only put 25 of your time to each whereas like an editor can put 100 of their time into it so like even if they're the same skill level as you they're just gonna [ __ ] on you because they have more time same with the camera guy or writer or whatever and so I think that's where a lot of people just don't realize like they're like well this person isn't as great is me or I can make better decisions yeah but you know 25 is generous so you can probably spend like 10 20 times more time than you can doing it yeah and so due to the sheer extra time they're gonna [ __ ] on you at that job or they [ __ ] on you mean just do it way better just do it better because they have more time yeah yeah like if I had to edit a video you know I just I'd have to put in literally one 100th the amount of time you know what I mean so they should be able to do better tricks should be a better cameraman than me because he could study it 30 000 times more than me now did you find initially I think this was our issue as we were starting to grow we've tried to rectify a bit but like uh that you were hiring people who could do a bunch of things when did you start getting specific in your hires um almost right away that's smart yeah yeah because I feel like what we did is like everybody did a little of everything and then it's hard to [ __ ] scale because we're all doing a little we're trying to pay less salary quite frankly oh really I mean one guy you can hire to do everything no no no I'm not a Chiefs game did you hear me beat Netflix with this special so so you immediately knew you're like okay just need these guys camera these guys editing yeah 100 yeah because you wouldn't hire a guy that box your floors to edit a video obviously yeah yeah we didn't do that we didn't do that we got the guys to edits him off the floor you understand absolutely literally yeah literally yeah yeah no yeah it is crazy thanks like because our main channel is killing it the gaming channel is killing it all it's it's wild part of the process makes you the most like gives you the most dopamine 100 uploading the video seeing like the real time in like the first five hours it gets like five million views it feels so great that's my favorite I always tell them my my favorite part of the day we drop an episode or like we drop a clip I go to the gym right when it drops I'm working out listening to tribal music watch like just refreshing YouTube studio and then you see it hit one and you're like oh what's that drug I imagine that's what it feels like Tesla it's the closest thing it's the closest thing it's so funny exactly that's that's my version yeah he still said Tesla was better because he said that's the closest thing well yeah I mean opposed to like artificially implanting your brains with chemicals yeah the closest the sand is like the the artificial hunt you know what I mean that's what it is yeah seeing the number just go up minute over a minute yeah back in the jungle I'm working out I'm running I'm on the treadmill trying to get the food and all of a sudden the views go up ugh the best best thing ever now is it equally painful if it doesn't do well no at this point are you like unattached to yeah you just look well because why what me getting depressed doesn't do anything you just look at it could should we change the thumbnail change it doesn't work better okay look at the retention graph why did it too bad take some notes move on you know what I mean like being super emotional over it doesn't really do anything it's usually uh which I used to be like if I had a bad video you would know like I'm like I would literally like cry you know especially when like I was betting the farm on every video like that's it you know then it was like [ __ ] like you know I can't pay Tariq if this doesn't do well wait did you ever have a week like that uh yeah but I would just take out a loan and then the next video all right we're gonna spend a little less guys um but now that we're like not as Reckless it's like yeah it's a lot easier to not care as much so you took out a loan to make the next video so yeah you went like uh yeah there was one month where I had to take | you make lots of money I agree but how no you say I make all this money and then you're like but I spend it all yeah but you still get to say that you make it yeah yeah so no one can really [ __ ] with you when it comes to making the money well I don't spend the money that's to you know for that reason but I guess that is true yeah if it does make it easier when people are like do you make a couple million a month like yeah because I just spend it all so it does make it exactly because if I did it if I was like oh yeah just make a couple million and that was the end then I just seemed like a douchebag exactly yes I do agree but I never really thought about it that way I did thank you you're like Adam Sandler in that way it's not like a multi-millionaire but you're like one of the guys still oh I like them like usually like really rich people you know we want to eat them yeah they buy speedsters and uh yeah and mansions and go on vacations to them all fees twice watches yeah and watches yeah yeah it's a replica right gambling degenerative are you one of the rich people they want to eat are you I'm not that rich not yet you are way more Rich than me uh but I | 8 | 6 | 4 | you make lots of money I agree but how no you say I make all this money and then you're like but I spend it all yeah but you still get to say that you make it yeah yeah so no one can really [ __ ] with you when it comes to making the money well I don't spend the money that's to you know for that reason but I guess that is true yeah if it does make it easier when people are like do you make a couple million a month like yeah because I just spend it all | I do agree but I never really thought about it that way I did thank you you're like Adam Sandler in that way it's not like a multi-millionaire but you're like one of the guys still oh I like them like usually like really rich people you know we want to eat them yeah they buy speedsters and uh yeah and mansions and go on vacations to them all fees twice watches yeah and watches yeah yeah it's a replica right gambling degenerative are you one of the rich people they want to eat are you I'm not that rich not yet you are way more Rich than me uh but I | 2,4,6 | 7,5,4 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 7 | 5 | 4 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGrk7Mzm4uo | 13,469 | WGrk7Mzm4uo | 2022-09-27 00:00:00 | I know all about YouTube analytics do you want me to help you with that I could use the help that's you yeah are you logged into the show's channel oh [ __ ] yeah hold on hold on hold on uh oh God that one was uh no the mile highs I was going to Antarctica a billion dollars if we could own the channel and the companies and stuff like that like that sounds enticing but but you've been offered a billion dollars for your YouTube channel with all the companies yeah what's different about the squid game video what did you tap into I I most spent like two million dollars on a video up to that point that one we spent 4.2 million that Sky up there is not real starting at the end of the blue is all CGI yeah all CGI and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president is that something you thought about it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just gave away every penny well there's literally zero dollars in my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing and then I just do what's best for people I like this yeah [Music] we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy good job your parents loved you when you're younger okay you don't no one's an elf did you just call me an elf it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice [Applause] should we fake your death he's trying to tear this whole thing apart like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga um like is there any steaks I said shakes or steaks what's up everybody and welcome to flagrant and today we are joined by Mr b6000 yeah it's funny because I don't have that name anymore wait why don't you have it did you abort it or something oh my God this is a great one uh yes welcome to flagrant I'm here because I had nothing better to do good that's the best reason to be here and uh and we're happy about it and we're just hoping that by the end of this episode I make the same amount of money as I did coming into the episode yeah I mean ideally but I'll just take the same fair enough you know we just don't lose a brand I mean you actually operate at a loss though based on your Rogan so we can do that oh yeah we can do that no problem that's true yeah but that's why if it dips it's a bigger loss you have the most brilliant way of saying that you make lots of money I agree but how no you say I make all this money and then you're like but I spend it all yeah but you still get to say that you make it yeah yeah so no one can really [ __ ] with you when it comes to making the money well I don't spend the money that's to you know for that reason but I guess that is true yeah if it does make it easier when people are like do you make a couple million a month like yeah because I just spend it all so it does make it exactly because if I did it if I was like oh yeah just make a couple million and that was the end then I just seemed like a douchebag exactly yes I do agree but I never really thought about it that way I did thank you you're like Adam Sandler in that way it's not like a multi-millionaire but you're like one of the guys still oh I like them like usually like really rich people you know we want to eat them yeah they buy speedsters and uh yeah and mansions and go on vacations to them all fees twice watches yeah and watches yeah yeah it's a replica right gambling degenerative are you one of the rich people they want to eat are you I'm not that rich not yet you are way more Rich than me uh but I I give my money away I'm poor yeah I give my money to my wife so what's your matter I feel like your fiscal policy is going to completely change once you get yeah yeah yeah yeah just giving away stuff all the time like yeah do more reaction videos from the kitchen yeah that's the reason is there a uh Mrs Beast there is we've only been dating like six months okay my boy how long have you been married don't do that it's media training yeah that was very good uh I've been married since the 18th of December no no December 18th I got married right decision really yes I recommend you do it and you don't need a place because you don't make any money okay did you get one did I get a prenup yeah she got me gonna regret that whatever something happens I know at least like three people who got one and I was friends with them when they got married and then like two of them you know didn't work out and every single one it's just interesting to see it go from like yeah we'll be together forever to like [ __ ] this is the worst decision of my life did you did you think about giving them some money uh because that'd be a great video this money yeah yeah just helping my friend who just got divorced tell you know the people at our food banks like less money this month gotta help my divorce they would actually get it they'd be like yeah they probably would he needs it he's probably waiting in line next to them yeah yeah is one of your friends that got divorced here uh no definitely not these 18 year olds no children Tara could have a child bride or something like that no not exactly sure [Laughter] um now you brought your son here bring your kids to work day yeah yeah now is that uncomfortable at all for you about to have my kids here yeah no and bring them back to work this is getting so uncomfortable we just wanted to give Carl a shout out we love Carl we're Big Carl fans here okay so you make millions and millions and millions of dollars who cares right yeah sure I make money because it's so much money you make just tons I don't know what to do with it you don't even know what to do with it no greed okay we don't I don't know okay but that's the fun thing yeah so it's just so much [ __ ] money okay and then you're giving it away constantly yep right and then More's coming in yeah and giving it away it's basically what I did like we I just had this Theory what well hopefully the Ponzi scheme never implodes got you like you know positive schemes are great up until they just go bust but no I had this idea when I was like 18 I was like when I made a couple thousand dollars a month I was like What if I just give it away and just try to make a little bit more than a couple thousand and then I just was like oh that worked and then I did it again yeah and I've done it every month ever since and I'm just like oh well it just works and it's like a couple Grand turned into 10 turned into 100 turn in a million it just keeps going up and I'm like oh now when when you ever did like the challenges where you're giving away to your guys if they win yeah were you ever worried that you would make them not really want to work that should be stimulus no no uh no especially when we were doing a lot they act different when they make like 150 grams yeah we're doing a lot of them hey they were like 10 grand or 20 grand and this was like Chris just left his job at Best Buy Tariq literally got I tried to hire Teri and he said no and then he went to work at a hospital then a year later he's like I'm depressed and I was like come on over most of them though like were just new and had like no money so like back then when they were fighting those challenges like that was like basically at the time so that's why uh but yeah you do see as time went on they didn't go as long the challenges and that's when obviously we transitioned to people like random people like at the start I wouldn't hook the boys up and then once they were good we're like okay let's start doing we can just start doing other people okay talk about hooking up uh when you're on Rogan you no no no you you brought up the fact that when you posted your first video it was when you got hacked playing uh Pirates battle pirates yeah whatever yeah have you found out who did it no I didn't but I should have they not reached out how would they Mr b6000 is their username right yes what are they gonna tweet me on Twitter like yeah you can do a YouTube video about it I'm Olivia's highest viewed video okay because because the story don't tell the story about like all of five people listening we're gonna [ __ ] the algorithm up already yeah you did [ __ ] your attention you know what um it's fine you know if you don't want this to your views that's up to you so um you're his son you're so true he starts this off with like oh by the way Joe Rogan got 10 million views and you know what goes through my head when he says I was like well it's completely up to the topics you bring up on whether or not we do it no I mean if this gets like a 40 minute retention we're passing that if this is like 25 minutes we're screwed yeah yeah so now we're down there okay so make this story I guess you know it gives a [ __ ] about a guy that hacked me when I was 11 years old on Facebook [ __ ] them our audience is actually uh older than 17. so why don't you go ahead they're insistent okay so when I was 11 I was playing the game a guy just started just destroying me absolutely crushing me every day he had to come through and attack my face and I got pissed so I made a video saying [ __ ] this guy although why there was no words I didn't know how to record audio I was stupid but it was just like him I just sent it to the devs and I uploaded it to YouTube and then it somehow got 20 000 views first video ever gets twenty thousand that's crazy because people who played the game would just watch it but they were trying to figure out how to hack and then like all the comments were like oh so there's a guy out there that's responsible for you posting on YouTube yeah for making pissing me off when I was 11 and then inadvertently making me make a video and he could be listening right now what do you want to say to that guy um thanks for making me Rich he needs a royalty name something I found out who he is would you break him off with a little something yeah of course I give him a couple thousand dollars what do you mean couple thousand that's at least a million right yeah no get him on it dude [ __ ] that guy oh you want to play Pirates now watch this that's a great question when when you're buried alive like do you guys ever think about like him being mean as a boss oh tell them your plan for if you die oh yeah they want me to die oh yeah 100 great video big time they do because the second I died yeah um Carl Chandler Chris the three guys Nolan maybe he's a little newer we haven't decided if he partakes yet or not yeah uh they all put their hand in my Tombstone last take it off gets the channel Everything 100 everything oh what about it dude you just left the brown guy out of this he's not on care he's the camera guy so like most people haven't seen him I mean I don't know what do you think Tariq gets to put his hand on the tombstone yes I think so as of right now it's just written in the like little plan it's just those three we have to update it and put Nolan and maybe Tariq in it yes it's like because we have a little gameplay so you know they can film the video yeah that is happening mark my words I don't even know if I've really said it publicly I tweeted it one time but I'm serious I don't give a [ __ ] how much you guys are cry right put their [ __ ] hands on the tombstone and give the channel to whoever wins okay and don't bully them for it they're just doing what I want and and you guys think you could do without him right like an interesting experiment I'm down should we fake your death dude oh [ __ ] no just like I want to do this the next 10 years and if I do that then like if I fake that did I pick count to 100 000. good point good point you can't take anything okay uh hold on real quick real quick most illegal go for it no uh most illegal video honestly I try to brainstorm legal videos so yeah that's probably a better use of your time okay um what about what about like a competition like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay is that the notepad you're flipping yeah yeah yeah yeah go ahead rip it up three that I for the podcast he's just slide through okay um this is a good tell me if you think this has good one retention and good like uh click through okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga that could work um like is there any steaks say again like anything on the line uh I said shakes or steaks I just got Invisalign all right my s's are not gonna come off correctly like maybe if it's like losers car gets hit by a meteor or something that's a good one that's good I like that okay oh okay wait a hundred kids go to an island last one leaves gets an internship with Jeffrey Epstein thoughts right he's dead or is he I haven't seen the body um yeah it's a banger that's right I don't know but yeah for the right reasons but you know get clicks it's probably by the FBI okay you were investigated by the FBI was that well that's what we're wondering oh no I was hunted by them for a video were they really hunting someone else in your crew you want to inform me do you know something I don't I think we know who he's looking at I don't know he's looking at Carl I was looking at Carl I was looking at Carl's dad and nobody else hey hey bro I'm gonna need you to respect Tariq yeah I do okay all right I'm gonna have to walk up yeah yeah you respect to people were spectators one trillion dollars I give you right now uh okay I have to spend it on the video okay what is it uh I bought everything I wanted in life and I just buy everything everything I don't think I get you to a trillion dog I'm gonna be honest now humans are expensive bro like oh I can figure it out people are like you couldn't spend a billion a day if you wanted to [ __ ] 10 super Yachts problem solved I could I could spend a trillion okay I'm just calling up like people who own neighborhoods buying entire neighborhoods you know wow I could figure it out one trillion you buy everything you want in life yeah I would just literally buy like half of America why not have you look into buying a planet uh uh no I mean like they're so far away you know how much cooler it is if planets weren't like 500 000 light years away there's like a realistic way we could visit them in our life yeah I feel like we'd all be way happier yeah yeah we'll just get out of here for a little bit it won't just stress Our Lives it's more fun yeah yeah but it's like you have to like build a ship and send it off and people have to have kids on it and kids and their kids will maybe see that planet it's kind of lame yeah yeah thing I mean that's what your boy's trying to do at least yeah Elon yeah yeah my boy did you believe him when he made that offer what offer if something bad happens to him oh on Twitter I love dude you did your research you think that you're gonna come on this bro my journalistic Integrity oh yeah he thinks he's a journalist but I'm a journalist bro really yeah well then you need to make up some lies that sounds good yeah yeah well first he has to buy it and then yeah I'm very confident if he bought it and died he'd give it to me totally and not the ambassadors that have tens of billions of dollars in it hmm that's a bad enemy to make though I wouldn't have made that deal with you what that oh if I I own Twitter if I die if I die then you get it the guy that is making videos and doing crazy could you imagine someone assassinates him but then like the holy motive I wonder who it could be okay and then they just want to assassinate him yeah they get a [ __ ] YouTube channel but what would you even do with Twitter I mean I don't know sell it's worth a lot of money Give It Away give it give it to a subscribers get some money oh no you stop being poor help him okay because he doesn't need help he he doesn't believe in philanthropy oh no I do believe no no you don't believe in places we've talked about this word on the streets you hate plenty I don't hate it I believe in it um what do you donate to say again we've talked about this a million I donated to Catholic Church I donated sperm for like the first maybe like no it's not three years [Laughter] I believe in philanthropy you've literally never done it I do believe in it he believes in it as an idea he just hasn't gotten around to it no I think I believe when you do it I think you do it yeah yeah wait I believe it you believe him I believe people do it what do you mean I don't know can I believe it and also not do it look I'm saying Jimmy donates millions of dollars every year he plants trees yeah he helps people yes food pantries yeah and you also have a lump of money yeah that you could use to help other people and why don't you um I I feel like you're doing a good job like if everybody what if I have a burger and I have chocolate and I'm giving everybody money and I'm giving everybody Islands you know what I mean your changes how many [ __ ] white oprahs do we need there we go I should give more man yeah agreed why why when did you start giving when I was like 15. oh you started young yeah that's the problem The Habit has been built yeah yeah exactly we're too old to start we got money ladies yeah yeah perfectly logical reason more importantly yeah everyone always talks about obviously you yo yo yo can you stop bullying us no He's a Bully but I love it this guy's a bully dude yeah yeah bro you're a [ __ ] on his side well I'm just saying I didn't realize son of a [ __ ] did you realize he's taller than you two he's the bullet everyone how tall are you wow all right okay your Netflix special that you you know sold on your own and you made more than they would have paid you yeah have you ever was with Netflix but yeah yeah have you ever like said how much money was publicly or anything like that no I haven't do you ever plan on it just every time I hear it I'm always curious like even on the car right over I like was thinking about I was like uh just how much did you [ __ ] on Netflix you know well this guy's good it's not I didn't say it was Netflix Oh wait really yeah I thought that was the whole thing everybody found it was Netflix I never said which one it is he's never revealed that bro I was beyond certain it was Netflix I don't [ __ ] know because he looks at the stock market Netflix is like here's a three million bang yeah delete some jokes and you're like [ __ ] you and then you made like 20 million and you just shat on them I didn't make 20 million yeah obviously that was just the number I put on my head but yeah what's happening yeah if I want bro do you plan on telling us how badly you should on said streaming service I I plan on just taking a moment [ __ ] an [ __ ] dude you just threw out 20 like it was nothing bro I apologize yeah I'm gonna talk [ __ ] man that's it now I'm putting it on YouTube because you said that what the number I'm gonna put the whole special on YouTube there and he's gonna donate his money and I'm gonna donate the money hold on to it hold on to it I'm gonna donate to who you said I'm gonna donate it to me and my wife I'm gonna donate to us and then when you get a divorce you'll get half of it [ __ ] [Laughter] [Laughter] any other [ __ ] questions no but I want that story we were talking about beforehand yeah about the yeah so when he was uh going through video ideas it reminded me of someone who just I can't remember if it was Dubai or somewhere in the Middle East this guy hired a private investigator in North Carolina I have no context to find me um and this is just something that happens yeah someone this happens a lot so whenever people call local private investigators they just let us know because a lot of people just want to know where I am for whatever reason oh the private investigators call you directly yeah it's usually which now I'm giving away my secrets but oh well I'm In Too Deep but yeah um so he calls us lets us know he's like this time it's someone from like Dubai we don't really know what he wants but he's just flying to North Carolina tomorrow and he just paid me to find you and we're like okay cool um and so then the next day he gets there and then with the private I have security somebody's security woman to private investigator to meet him and my Security's just like why the [ __ ] are you here why are you trying to find Jimmy and the guy's like I just have video ideas I really want to give them and my security is like [ __ ] you why are you actually here he's he just kept saying it like 30 times in a row he's just like I just want to give him the sheet of ideas so it's just a piece of paper with video ideas flies across the world private investigator everything instead of like we don't believe you and so they like he let them my security search his hotel room couldn't find anything nothing in there just a suitcase of clothes um and he's just literally just did all that to give me a list of ideas and then and then well my security was like oh Jimmy's out of town for three months did you ever get the [ __ ] yeah well then just get took it I was like I'll give it to Jimmy and then he gave it to me and it was just like it was like open up a free gas station like open that's actually that's a very Middle Eastern idea yeah he's trying to make money off you it was like 30 ideas like that and I was just like this is actually a lot of women read in public or something like that we we did get squid game out of that [ __ ] yeah [ __ ] I sold a guy from Dubai's idea this is before the real squid game that's the game yeah no he wrote it all out yeah this guy just hired private investigators flew down there all this muddy camped out just to give me a list of video ideas and none of them were good none of them were good I got I got plenty of ideas yeah yeah I need ideas give me the Dubai ideas it's much easier to fly here at the North Carolina do you have a lot of people uh doing that like uh just okay you hear the stories of people going like I risk everything to be here like I saw Carl's story of like I spent my last dollar and then I ended up working out and that kind of inspires every lunatic to take their last dollar yeah to just show up I just I live in my studio now yeah so it's like fin stand and stuff that's and most people know that so they don't but sometimes you know the gym in the bedroom but sometimes I'll go out and they'll just be like yeah this guy's just been camping behind a gas station for like a month waiting to see you and I'm like lovely and how do you say I just like tell him I'm just not interested like that's not how you know I like to meet people but that's still like occasionally happens and it's always like that never pissed them off because you're not like I mean that's not the nicest I'm not I don't think anyone expects me to just go and be people who just can't battle wait for my attention because you don't know like they might be trying to kill me they might be whatever yeah so it used to be it's weird I like hostiles sometimes it's like a lot and then sometimes it's not as much yeah have you ever had a dangerous moment like with your security where they had to intervene and like get someone off you um dangerous car can you think of one uh not really no nobody cares enough yeah you know Baxter's ever a crowd of five people is it ever women waiting to see okay Mr Beast no I usually um no but we've never had any like crazy issues it's actually kind of weird like with the mall one like that went really well even though like crazy yeah at one point there's like 20 000 people in there yeah and girls showing tits and [ __ ] these are jokes these are videos these are children really they're screenshots in the video of like of girls like flashing I hope not yeah no that was nuts it was crazy yeah and they had like the the American flag like pasties or whatever like that this is not true you didn't see this it's on it's there was a whole quibby series that they made about is that what it was nope turn the phone when within five seconds of using quibby I want to watch the show and I was like this is garbage I went to screenshot and the screenshot was black yeah and that's how I knew it would fail because you can't make memes they made it where you couldn't take screenshots of anything Netflix's problem too yeah well at least Netflix like you can watch it on your computer and it's easier to screenshot yeah clivia was phone only and there's zero way to take a screenshot okay so it's like how the [ __ ] do you expect these shows to go viral yeah like that was the same time of baby Yoda and all this stuff and then quibby's just like no no memes yeah and it's like no one's ripping your [ __ ] shows can you explain that a little bit more about how like memes Drive the culture of 100 yeah like the Mandalorian you get rid of baby Yoda memes it's like nobody even talks about it exactly I I never would watch it now when you're creating videos here you also going like what do you think will be memeable in this uh I probably should but no but no yeah right now I'm just film and TV like film TV it's what is memeable no not only it's just it's just something that happens naturally if you're just kidding or no one can take screenshots and you're just an idiot you know I mean because that's how you just get attention on Twitter it's like cutting one of your legs out for money yeah if you try to make a meme then your cringe like memes just happen yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you mean like if you're the creator of the TV show like The House of dragons is going this is the memeable moment exactly you I don't think you can ever do that you can't force them you can embrace it though after it's like organically possible lean in yeah yeah I think you have to yeah that like what is that movie morbius or whatever yeah movie that got absolutely destroyed yeah did you see there but it still did well right I don't know I'm pretty sure like the destroying it caused it to they put it back out in theaters oh really it went viral as like a meme and they're like we're re-releasing it opinion says well with the like people actually I was enjoyed though yeah you did that you did yeah we did we bought every ticket in a theater and then we just flooded with people in suits oh it's amazing it's great and I heard they made that [ __ ] illegal yeah like they did a few places yeah it's like for the first seven three years I go to a movie theater and then like three days later it's like no you can't do that also like uh the most mature way to dress yeah right yeah it has a very cultish feel to it though just a bunch of young white kids in suits and whatever yo yeah this is scary you're saying if there's like a bunch of white people all dressed the same you would like to make you feel uncomfortable a little bit I wonder if I walked in and it was just a hundred black people in suits how I would feel yeah Men In Black because I think the New Mexico Studios what's going on yeah that is wild I don't know why that is concerning it shouldn't be illegal but it does make you literally because some of them started lighting firecrackers in the movie theater and one of them like blew up a couple seats I told you man it's a dangerous thing you can't trust that many white people just the same why we get out of it we get out of hand you get yeah you get one group thinking it's just a it's just a mob also yeah yeah but it is fun see me and then we break it up so it's not too much white boy [ __ ] going on yeah yeah so every time Mark and I are starting to get hyped about things yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not good that's actually a really good idea that's why fatic is a part of the team so that's it gotcha too much fun he's not good we keep his camera off he's like Sid Vicious we don't even use it yeah you're content made it but just in case you guys start going you want to go to Charlottesville he's like everybody chill out this is very important that's how you build your team oh that's smart Teresa Foundation right yes okay this is good are they allowed to have girlfriends is the team allowed to have girlfriends I wish not but you know if they want to are they just drowning in strange or what oh my gosh let's cut over time boy [Laughter] dude okay girl I didn't know you had it like that my voice [Music] [Laughter] Nola's got a little something going on I know 100 right chain out by the way yeah oh I love it some wild [ __ ] boys you got over here oh [ __ ] crazy again what are you guys do on a Saturday like split a six-pack of white claws dude all right well I don't I just work all the time yeah yeah so I usually see them when we're filming but outside that I don't see them too much anymore okay how do you split the work balance with your girl you've introduced this relationship in last time yeah that's what US married guys want to know yeah I got you guys the answers you've been needing she's actually from South Africa so she can only come here 90 days a year anyways so it just naturally Works itself out [Music] African-American uh I'm working on it a white woman and African-American oh there's your video wedding episode it is a little weird that like like she makes good money she's like gone to college multiple degrees everything you would want you would want her here yeah but I still feel like there's just literally no way to get her in America like you why don't we like reform our immigration process we're like yeah we should let in the good ones right who said that why are you making it bad why are you making it bad you're twisting I don't want my girlfriend you've been doing this to him for an hour okay um but you can marry her and then she's in yeah I'll just marry her yeah that seems like a reasonable way you could actually have Nolan do it no one could marry your guy it would be a great video is that like a company could I just pay someone to marry her yeah yeah really is that like it's not a company but no one can do it are you thinking about I don't know what like if she has to marry someone I see on it you know this is a little bit but if it doesn't do anything but it feels just like some guy that I'll never see again and they just like marry so she can move here like but he might try something no no one's an elf look at that like he's not gonna do anything yeah but the problem is no one will make fun of me but the thing is because there's a lot of the Rings call me an elf yeah [Music] it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice it's a compliment cookies in a tree that's what he's saying no Lord of the Rings bro I've seen Lord of the Rings I just don't know what I look like you know the people that you're like my family no no not your ears your [ __ ] head and your skin and your yes your beauty [Laughter] married to my girlfriend maybe he's not doing nothing yeah but he's got that over himself no he doesn't win a single argument anymore that's it why what happened because I'm married to your girlfriend but then you can also look at that do you know who that is Legolas yes yeah yeah yeah [Laughter] wait what else do we got in here yeah yeah yeah I was surprised you're not grabbing your phone back wait you're gonna let him look him look at your photos yeah yeah yeah it can't happen no yeah okay you you guys should trade phones that'd be fun oh me and you yeah do you want to do that ah I feel like he's just gonna like go through my YouTube analytics and start blurting out numbers well I maybe that's actually a great idea actually probably he wasn't good do you want me to help you with that I I could use the help that'd be great I mean we could work on some TMS are you the behind the scenes guy no it's all it's awesome [Laughter] yeah are you logged into the show's channel yeah what are we doing right now wait hold on hold on hold on what are we doing here we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy bro no you're killing it crazy guys he's a good job I keep up the good work you know what I will not compliment you the rest yeah he's gonna give you advice and then you're gonna give him your parents loved you and you're younger you don't know someone abused this man and he just doesn't know how to take us off I'm proud of you for having two million subscribers wow and he's like what the [ __ ] did you just say I was like I'm proud wow okay Solomon over here bro yeah you could tell the accuracy by how fast we both did Jesus Christ my Dad loved me at least you know hey Mom still stepped it up a little bit so it's RPM's a little how do we get that up yeah yeah what'd he say RPM RPMs yeah I've been working on those yeah yeah you definitely I love the RPM so you swear a lot in the video say again you swear a lot in the videos I I wouldn't no you did I could tell you dude just look at the revenue I don't swear you have to I don't swear it wouldn't be this love you didn't swear racist a lot but that's not cussing gotcha do you know what I mean yeah a substitute like you know oh you're saying say things that are wrong yeah you say things that you know advertisers naughty yes but we have great advertisers the numbers it's just funny that like I could never looking for a chocolate bar sponsorship actually can we sponsor the next one yeah how do you charge an episode for you yeah free oh philanthropy thank you yeah you almost said Felicia it's only one other time okay palette of chocolate right there matter of fact we need to replace the trees we will replace it with a paddle of chocolate matter of fact matter of fact I've been wanting to try your burger let's see how fast are the Beast Burgers usually come go Mark uh uh probably 30 minutes 30 minutes well we might get them a little quicker uh what are they here is it only hamburgers or do you have anything for people who aren't going uh yeah he doesn't eat beef we have a grilled cheese oh that sounds fun I'm working on oh no we have impossible meat as well okay I forgot we launched that it's just like three percent of our sales like no one gives a [ __ ] I was like really expecting people to [ __ ] with the plant-based first we were friends you know what I mean I thought we had a thing and we just [ __ ] on him together no what this that's nothing it's just in general America just doesn't give a [ __ ] thank you yeah because I was like really hoping that would like explode and like no one cared about the impossible me yeah and we also did like lettuce wraps where you can substitute the bun for a letter that sounds great like that yeah that sounds fun when people want a burger they want a burger that's what I found out the hardware what's up guys today's episode is sponsored by surf shark surf shark is a modern VPN design with the user in mind their utilities are powered by a robust security mechanism but designed to be simple intuitive to use enjoy all the freedoms of an open internet safely and 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back to the show look at this how long have these been sitting around hold on one second because if they say these are bad it's not my fault no we got some real Beast Burgers okay this is it Mr Beast that old ass packaging oh oh God here we go wait a minute okay this is weird that looks awful like a Big Mac s Special Sauce it looks like a Big Mac dude I mean when you order we order from McDonald's cheese lettuce onions oh what is this it looked like two old beef patties mustard sauce pickles cheese lettuce I just thought it says hasn't been opened yeah so this is a Big Mac then you guys really move it off how are you going to use my card and not get an impossible Burger you can eat beef why not oh I mean it's impossible this is a beast Burger this is what happens when you hang out with comedian yes okay so these do look like Big Mac so that is a big mac oh that is yeah oh so that's what the Beast burger no you can't help your [ __ ] you but no don't know what's going on let me see this he uses ghost kitchens right oh this one though that looks more like her that's what hold on let me okay that's it hold on hold on hold on dude do you have like a do you have like a team that we could call like an HR son that's crazy because we didn't do that you did no we did not swear there's not a coincidence that the ones without the stickers are Big Macs and the ones with the stickers not opened aren't [Laughter] yeah it looks like it's been centered around a little bit but it looks good I'm gonna take a bite right now it's not my fault if it's been sitting out for an hour is there money in there oh no I'm not gonna lie I have fire it's got fries on it um that's bar hey that's Chandler so whoever's on our marketing team make an ad of him saying that and just run it all over that's fine just Target everyone within 100 mile radius of this or anyone that goes to a show just hit him with Instagram ads if I'm going that's far I think that's [ __ ] fire right there what do you rate that one out of ten burger burger review honestly down down honestly no not honestly guys while you're ready I'm honest with you right now this needs a little more sauce okay probably because it's been sitting around a little bit it's dried up oh yeah you this this the version they ordered is the one with no sauce well you don't need to throw it like that that's the old factory they need to update it they need to update that [ __ ] yeah agree [ __ ] that package agreed what's wrong with Angry Birds Packaging Patty yeah excellent I agree Patty is excellent dare I say the best you've ever had for fast food okay dude I'm an in and out Enthusiast I feel the return retention you know just give us the rating so we can love it holy [ __ ] that's reduction step it up bro miles the single please one out of ten all right you know what I'll take it if it saves the podcast it's just hardwired you can't spend a decade of your life studying how to go violent how to get people to watch the video and then have it fire bomb in front of your eyes to not like hurt your soul yeah so you think about that with everything yeah it'd be like the same as if I started doing stand up there and it was just god-awful you would be like I gotta like what about during sex do you ever be like oh my God I'm starting to look around the room a little bit like Africa would be nice to be back right now it's been more than three minutes I think we got enough RPMs so is there a collab burger or food product that we the flagrant Beast products yeah I know [Music] [Laughter] [Laughter] so Jimmy gave you some advice on your channel we'll suck less yeah um what is uh what's your advice for his channel oh number one uh plane crash video very close to 911. I intentionally made sure we did not upload in September they were like you know we might need more time I was like you don't have more time [Applause] I was like this is like we're a couple days away from September like that's so funny it's like no one gives you advice on your channel so this is gonna be a perfect tons of advice every time I upload I get like 40 phone calls from people tell me how it could be about it is there somebody you watch that you still learn a lot from on YouTube that you're like oh that guy I could learn from uh I mean everyone like even like anybody more than anyone else anybody no it changes it's just like I just like watching random Youtube videos and like even like a homeless person on the street you can learn something from like how to be more humble or what what it's like for someone who's struggling so like if you apply that same mindset to videos like every video you watch there's something you can learn especially if it has a million views like there's a reason it got a million views okay I could give you the dumb dick joke answer Alex didn't believe that you got buried oh you didn't no interesting he had a whole reason for why you didn't get buried I kind of forgot you don't just forget yourself this is the most viewed video You're questioning my existence yeah exactly I'm just saying the camera angles made it seem as though oh I could have fixed it I remember this whoa I know and I think you're you're worth too much to take that risk uh yeah my mom was like crying when I filmed this video I was like Mom I promise we did the math um let me skip to over here to show you there's a scene where the boys literally dig down and yeah see that penis sign yeah they literally dug down and put that there yeah uh so you you could have planned wait wait right here oh Carl wait wait for the cut right here look you can literally see where they put the sign there and how deep it is underground or that could have just been shot at a different time where whoa Carl is on to us what if like to Arena like Brandon here it was like hey Jimmy I need you really uncomfortable yeah okay with this video specifically okay yeah um well there's two I'm curious about for the same reason this the one where you're in the the outdoor pool and you're under underwater yeah the thing bro that was done like five years ago this yeah the headache yeah have you figured out what that was about yeah it's because uh I was an idiot back then in the like we were pumping air in but the CO2 or whatever the [ __ ] you it doesn't get pumped out yeah getting pumped out yeah so you're just inhaling your own carbon yeah and so then when I started getting a headache I was like oh [ __ ] and then dioxide yeah yeah carbon dioxide so then we like called someone who know what they're doing they're like yeah you're an idiot yeah yeah okay and I just got out immediately okay and then when you're buried under this is what we learned from it so we had a pump that was pumping in air and pumping out the old Air what was the most catastrophic thought you had while you were completely buried I uh tried there was a camera at my feet three could also talk about this too uh and I went to like go adjust it and I couldn't so I like literally turned around and I'm you know not super flexible so I literally like was going to turn and so like I'm laying like this and as I'm like Disney I got caught like halfway and I was like [ __ ] I'm [ __ ] I'm fine I was literally like guys if I can't get out of this in two seconds you start digging right the [ __ ] now because I was like cotton is super awkward position like in the thing and I just like I'm gonna give it one last try and I just pushed as hard as I could and I popped out the other end and then I adjusted the camera and then you had to get back exactly because have my because it's like the thing got Slimmer this way yeah it was so uncomfortable on that side yeah so then I had to do it again and I almost got stuck again like what was going through your head when you were watching it Mike this was the first time he like panicked during the whole situation yeah we got really scared no did you calculate how much time it would take to excavate yeah they knew that because uh I mean it was like they could get me out in under five minutes if I really needed to be I okay I started practicing with my hand on the tombstone [Laughter] I see you this feels good it feels real good yeah so any of these other ones up here you think are fake no I just thought that one I think you counting to 100. he set his sights on you he's about to start [ __ ] on you well he's like I think your [ __ ] shoes are fake or fake easy so subreddits would go crazy exposing me and I just didn't care and I thought it was the funniest thing ever that's so smart and then I wore a fake Supreme shirt in a video same thing Reddit just lost their mind and I just I just love doing it to piss him off I mean it also keeps you in the conversation even more though no it's just funny to like watch them analyze the box logo and why it's not real you also save money you don't have to buy that's true yeah I'm still terrified about this buried alive dude I'm I'm severely claustrophobic wow oh yeah severely close so the nights before I slept in a coffin in my garage to like oh you get used here yeah emo phase too so you put a little effort in so there's just this coffin in my cold ass garage and I just lay in it close it chill there for a couple hours do you like consult with people about this first that one David Blaine yeah interesting because he did a week so I was gonna do 24 hours Bear live and then I called David and I was like I'm gonna bury myself for 24 hours and he's like that's it and I said all right I'm doing it for 50 hours and that's why it's 50 hours instead of 24. yeah but did you see his dumbass balloon thing who is he to judge I mean that's pretty cool whatever the balloon oh he just flew in a balloon it was like upper he held on to balloons flew up and then popped him came down yeah it was pretty cool but yeah that's so I I had to double it because he just basically Shadow my entire existence I mean we would have been fine if you did 24 hours just the Buried Alive thing like what is the the oxygen tank malfunctioned I couldn't handle being stuck in an elevator for 24 seconds there's enough oxygen in there for five minutes yeah I guess you're right we had so we buried that cop in like five separate times we had you know David Blaine Consulting a bunch of other people Consulting I was probably safer under there than I was above ground I think that's what they told me yeah yeah I don't know if that's true the dirt on the glass and you realize it's like this much glass between you and just thousands of pounds of dirt then it's like well [ __ ] oh that's right if it eats a little bit of a crack did you hear any weird sounds so terrified I'm sure I heard tons of stuff oh but we tried to keep it upbeat and not like I was super scared so like in the video I don't think we really put that kind of stuff did that help you get less scared knowing so many people are watching if you get scared it's kind of embarrassing whatever so that kind of blocks out that no that whole time I was just like for the love of God don't crack like because all I did was stare up at that dirt and so I just saw six thousand ten thousand whatever thousand pounds of dirt the whole time for like 50 hours straight and it hurts like [ __ ] like the bottom is just wood so you're just like that in of itself is a gem like you're just like laying on wood it was it wasn't fun but you know 194 million views not that bad I would do it again yeah what was the worst one to do the one you would never do again um that's a great way let me flip through these no buried alive I do again a heartbeat that wasn't like in the grand scheme of things it wasn't too crazy uh 50 hours in solitary you can find me don't seem that bad no well after you're married that seems like a kind of a vacation yeah now you have the [ __ ] Goofy Goobers over here torturing you and they won't let me sleep or do anything uh okay no Carl what's the hard one there's what I I say all the time but I'm just drawing blank well it's not counted before I was nice maybe yes I spent 25 hours a night that was miserable I you couldn't pay me to do that anymore what do you mean we just built a house that ice and I just spent 24 hours in it were you wearing something they would like pants like this and like a short sleeve shirt it was brutal I was like shivering all night it was one of those ones like 10 hours in I was like I'm too invested to quit but currently wouldn't do it that was like Peak grind me where I was like you know I'll do things as long as you know I'm not putting my life in danger like which we had man that's the widest thing you've done really love not being cold it's like a thing I've noticed is why people walk around yeah yeah let's go yeah that that's your whitest sitting in ice for 24 hours yeah yeah that was fruit how many views did they get uh like 100 million it kind of flopped I'm just kidding what is a flop for you now um if a video doesn't get like 50 million views it kind of sucks so but that's in English and then we dub them in other languages I love this yeah have you seen the Espanol Channel yeah yeah you should do that we yeah yeah so that one's been crushing we just hit 20 million you know what's weird is I bet people already were doing that for your videos yeah they were especially in like Japan for some reason yeah people used to upload their videos like crazy and they get millions of views yeah yeah so then that's why we just started doing it but the way that you guys do it is smart where you get the actors that are known the exactly well there's a huge secondary market for Mr Beast videos so like we'd come up with an original idea whatever like I don't know press this button 100 Grand and then the next day you'd see people on Spanish-speaking communities Japan Russia all over the world do the exact same video so part of this as well like everyone would just rip off our videos around the world because that was like a huge strategy like people at all these countries or just see who can copy our English videos first in their country and now that we do this like the rate of that has decreased a lot wow I wonder fake Supreme t-shirt exactly yeah exactly if people do that with our stand-up oh 100 they do There's a comic I'll leave his name out but um it was like huge in France and apparently he was just using Seinfeld's material I'm talking about oh but I'll tell you after I think he was just like using Seinfeld's material and then they became friends really yeah because Seinfeld is such a [ __ ] Maniac he was like this guy's got great taste like if he's gonna if he's gonna steal something he steals from the best and then they became buddies but he was like a huge comic there how crazy is that I've never heard Seinfeld I love Utah no no no I love you dude yeah that's the best thing you've said on this whole podcast do you know who he is even well I know because you got Tariq talks about comedians all the time yeah but but you but whatever right no he's a non-factor right like explain like to me like like a non I'm pretty he's in um he has a show that's that's on no no but no no he does I know you're [ __ ] with me you don't know how much you hate Seinfeld yeah yeah yeah I don't hate him but I just think he's whatever but the fact that the fact that you don't even know keep going about this like talk me through this like what are you feeling about emotionally retention through the roof right now this is going okay guys just like Drake talks about him and that's about it but he has a show or like what is this thing like isn't it I think I'm gonna sound dumb isn't it like Better Call Saul or something like that or no yes yes what is wait the show is Seinfeld yeah okay gotcha but that's okay his show is actually called Breaking Bad yeah yeah yeah yeah but go on go on go on but yeah okay yeah no Andrew I need you to ask him about movies he's never seen an entire movie in his one movie in his entire life I grew up on YouTube this guy's never seen movies yeah it was because he was homeschooled this was different with you right uh yeah no I just thought it was waste did you have chickenpox as a kid oh my gosh probably you just had shingles like a couple months ago so that means shingles means you've had chickenpox oh yeah it's the same virus though yeah yeah so there you go yes Mark just had chickenpox at the ripe age of 25 years old who are you to talk what are you talking about a compromised immune system I know same same way oh really no it's Crohn's oh you got Crohn's yeah can you eat your Burgers uh yeah those are fine it's mostly just I don't know I'm just so heavily medicated it's like in remission right now but if I wasn't on medicine it would be different oh what type of meds uh Remicade not that anyone knows what that is you ever do a Remicade at a party one time no but if you ever tried a Tesla ecstasy pill because that's [ __ ] amazing are you public about doing drugs dude love them literally I was like yeah I'm on my way over he's like is it like an X that's what is it ecstasy Etsy that's where people make [ __ ] you drugs yeah I'm a Christian boy I don't do drugs he's like okay okay I didn't know if you were [ __ ] with me or not because like you'd also like he's going back and forth with like being very sarcastic and then like very serious in the text so I have no [ __ ] we've never spoken on the phone before at all and like so we're on the phone we're on the group text with Tariq and he's like listen we need to kick Tariq out of the room immediately after he comes here I go okay that's fine and then he messaged me on the side he goes I would like to talk to you privately but the joke was that Tariq just loves you guys and so I was all that stupid [ __ ] I was saying and there was to embarrass him because he is he cringing in the back of the car and I remember so I just say some dumb [ __ ] to you like yeah I don't [ __ ] care or whatever and then I just looked back and he's just like hey hey you're a good guy dude Tark you're a good guy hey thank you and we're gonna pronounce your name right every single time yeah okay appreciate it guys appreciate it 100 you are a good Christian boy though is it true that your old YouTube Banner used to be like a Bible verse it did I used to go to a Christian School back in the day oh yeah but now it's like it's just kind of hard to tell what's right or what's wrong like religion wise there's so many and I don't know I believe there is some kind of God but how do you know damn Mark just got so sorry right [Laughter] because he's such a [ __ ] Catholic oh is that why you donate to the Catholic Church yeah yeah he bullish you no he calls that my paycheck that's what it is yeah yeah he gives me money hey I have his Revenue up here I mean he could probably make some more donations I think so donations right but for so so have your feelings changed since tark's been around or like has he are you expanding the caliph oh my gosh Jesus it is admirable to see how devoted he is though yeah like he doesn't he doesn't drink he doesn't do anything he he's actually he's not one of those people that just preach it he actually follows it sometimes it does make me go like damn like there's something there like he really cares a lot you know it's easier we're busy guys okay five times a day he gets his five minutes I'm just saying this guy Titanic have you seen it no I haven't seen it at all was it that before I was born before I was 18 I didn't even listen to music because I was like this is a waste time I should watch more YouTube I'm an idiot are you like a I'm not even are you like on a spectrum of some kind probably a little bit I've never gotten tested but it's just like if you want to make great YouTube videos you just watch YouTube so like a two hour movie you can watch like 20 YouTube videos and you get exponentially smarter doing that you know Mark just Wikipedia's movies so he knows what happens and then uses codes from them you know I actually thought about paying someone to like just give me a synopsis of all the biggest movies because like I have never watched Harry Potter or Star Wars or any of it and the amount of times in my life people just you know are like what you've never seen it yeah like it's it used to be funny now it's getting to the point where it's like it's kind of sad so you didn't even watch squid game uh no that I did watch before we filmed it of course and then after watching it were you like wow this is fun yeah we should recreate it but in general we're like whoa like TV shows are cool there's a feeling you can get from a long form series it's really good this is the thing where people misconstrue I don't think movies are bad I just think I want to be the greatest YouTuber to ever live and so like I should just focus on my thing you know I think you've achieved that already uh yeah which is why now I do watch a little bit more let me ask you that about being the greatest YouTube ever what's next because I was listening to your Rogan and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president I know I'll say that'd be fun is that something you've thought about yeah the only thing political aspirations um uh yeah I I would love to I just feel like you have to do a lot of politics leading up to it and I don't know like if you could just go from you know no one ever has done this just being a celebrity to just being president that would be great but if I have to like work my way up and be like a bear I think we've realized you don't have to yeah it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really yeah that'd be bro if I'm telling you if I was if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just give away every penny literally zero dollars for my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing like you're voting for me yeah I like I have 10 billion dollars give away every penny can't be bought because I you know I gave all my money and then I just do what's best for people and I like this yeah and just ignore lobbyists or whatever I like but you need to keep money in order to ignore the lobbyists because otherwise no I give it all away and we're good well there's freedom and I get 400 Grand a year of this President I'm good oh yeah you can live off that 100 and the taxpayers yeah dude I like this I think that I hear you I think if I wanted to like 24 right now yeah so it didn't feel okay yeah it'd be like three more Cycles but I wouldn't do I'd probably do it in my mid-40s yeah yeah I think I could make it interesting enough where I could win okay well how what give away all my money and just like you know I know how to give people's attention I can't say too much because I don't regret it in the future I think yeah I'll just trick all the [ __ ] idiots and before you do that PornHub would you take over that oh my God I would like to do the thumbnails and you know just boost the CTR yeah more saturation yeah you said uh I bought YouTube early on in the interview you said this is what I'm gonna do for the next 10 years of my life you have it's 10 years you're doing YouTube and then what you said a very specific number yeah um well I don't know it just kind of depends how things go like if we have thousands of Beast burgers and feastables go as well when we start mobile game company and other stuff like that I don't know there might just be a world where I run those companies uh yeah it's just let me just see it what do you like what do you like better you like creating or running the companies I love creating and I also it's weird I like both but you like running the companies yeah I do it's a lot of fun it's like being like it's much easier to run a burger joint than to have to like break the internet every week you know I made our to run feastfuls you know I mean because you just get a kick-ass team and you just kind of like Point them in the right direction whereas like this is like I gotta do just crazy [ __ ] that's never thought of and it's a coin flip and you don't even really know of people who care yeah you gotta do that every week and it's all got to be me yeah all sitting around me every week forever yeah um but I enjoy both I think like yeah um like we just opened up our first physical piece Burger which is crushing it um that one's doing like 30 000 a day right now wow and then feastables is in every Walmart now and that's crushing it so it's it's interesting I I'm so impressed by your ability to scale I think that's the toughest thing for a Creator scale like scale your business so like hire a team train that team yes to do those roles so that you can create more time for yourself yeah and I think that's like an unbelievably difficult thing like for me I find it incredibly different I often find like I'm the bottleneck for the things that we're doing 100 and that's not to say that all these guys aren't unbelievably talented and better than me in every single thing that they do yeah but a lot of times it might come down to a decision I have to make and then all of a sudden we're Limited in an output 100 and yeah I'm just like the way you should see it yeah is like you know if hypothetically like for creating content you have like the making the video having the production the editing camera work or whatever writing stuff like even if you split your time evenly you can only put 25 of your time to each whereas like an editor can put 100 of their time into it so like even if they're the same skill level as you they're just gonna [ __ ] on you because they have more time same with the camera guy or writer or whatever and so I think that's where a lot of people just don't realize like they're like well this person isn't as great is me or I can make better decisions yeah but you know 25 is generous so you can probably spend like 10 20 times more time than you can doing it yeah and so due to the sheer extra time they're gonna [ __ ] on you at that job or they [ __ ] on you mean just do it way better just do it better because they have more time yeah yeah like if I had to edit a video you know I just I'd have to put in literally one 100th the amount of time you know what I mean so they should be able to do better tricks should be a better cameraman than me because he could study it 30 000 times more than me now did you find initially I think this was our issue as we were starting to grow we've tried to rectify a bit but like uh that you were hiring people who could do a bunch of things when did you start getting specific in your hires um almost right away that's smart yeah yeah because I feel like what we did is like everybody did a little of everything and then it's hard to [ __ ] scale because we're all doing a little we're trying to pay less salary quite frankly oh really I mean one guy you can hire to do everything no no no I'm not a Chiefs game did you hear me beat Netflix with this special so so you immediately knew you're like okay just need these guys camera these guys editing yeah 100 yeah because you wouldn't hire a guy that box your floors to edit a video obviously yeah yeah we didn't do that we didn't do that we got the guys to edits him off the floor you understand absolutely literally yeah literally yeah yeah no yeah it is crazy thanks like because our main channel is killing it the gaming channel is killing it all it's it's wild part of the process makes you the most like gives you the most dopamine 100 uploading the video seeing like the real time in like the first five hours it gets like five million views it feels so great that's my favorite I always tell them my my favorite part of the day we drop an episode or like we drop a clip I go to the gym right when it drops I'm working out listening to tribal music watch like just refreshing YouTube studio and then you see it hit one and you're like oh what's that drug I imagine that's what it feels like Tesla it's the closest thing it's the closest thing it's so funny exactly that's that's my version yeah he still said Tesla was better because he said that's the closest thing well yeah I mean opposed to like artificially implanting your brains with chemicals yeah the closest the sand is like the the artificial hunt you know what I mean that's what it is yeah seeing the number just go up minute over a minute yeah back in the jungle I'm working out I'm running I'm on the treadmill trying to get the food and all of a sudden the views go up ugh the best best thing ever now is it equally painful if it doesn't do well no at this point are you like unattached to yeah you just look well because why what me getting depressed doesn't do anything you just look at it could should we change the thumbnail change it doesn't work better okay look at the retention graph why did it too bad take some notes move on you know what I mean like being super emotional over it doesn't really do anything it's usually uh which I used to be like if I had a bad video you would know like I'm like I would literally like cry you know especially when like I was betting the farm on every video like that's it you know then it was like [ __ ] like you know I can't pay Tariq if this doesn't do well wait did you ever have a week like that uh yeah but I would just take out a loan and then the next video all right we're gonna spend a little less guys um but now that we're like not as Reckless it's like yeah it's a lot easier to not care as much so you took out a loan to make the next video so yeah you went like uh yeah there was one month where I had to take | I give my money away I'm poor yeah I give my money to my wife so what's your matter I feel like your fiscal policy is going to completely change once you get yeah yeah yeah yeah just giving away stuff all the time like yeah do more reaction videos from the kitchen yeah that's the reason is there a uh Mrs Beast there is we've only been dating like six months okay my boy how long have you been married don't do that it's media training yeah that was very good uh I've been married since the 18th of December no no December 18th I got married right decision really yes I recommend you do it and you don't need a place because you don't make any money okay did you get one did I get a prenup yeah she got me gonna regret that whatever something happens I know at least like three people who got one and I was friends with them when they got married and then like two of them you know didn't work out and every single one it's just interesting to see it go from like yeah we'll be together forever to like [ __ ] this is the worst decision of my life did you did you think about giving them some money uh because that'd be a great video this money yeah yeah just helping my friend who just got divorced tell you know the people at our food banks like | 8 | 6 | 4 | I give my money away I'm poor yeah I give my money to my wife so what's your matter | I feel like your fiscal policy is going to completely change once you get yeah yeah yeah yeah just giving away stuff all the time like yeah do more reaction videos from the kitchen | 2,-3,4 | 6,8,3 | 2 | -3 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGrk7Mzm4uo | 13,469 | WGrk7Mzm4uo | 2022-09-27 00:00:00 | I know all about YouTube analytics do you want me to help you with that I could use the help that's you yeah are you logged into the show's channel oh [ __ ] yeah hold on hold on hold on uh oh God that one was uh no the mile highs I was going to Antarctica a billion dollars if we could own the channel and the companies and stuff like that like that sounds enticing but but you've been offered a billion dollars for your YouTube channel with all the companies yeah what's different about the squid game video what did you tap into I I most spent like two million dollars on a video up to that point that one we spent 4.2 million that Sky up there is not real starting at the end of the blue is all CGI yeah all CGI and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president is that something you thought about it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just gave away every penny well there's literally zero dollars in my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing and then I just do what's best for people I like this yeah [Music] we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy good job your parents loved you when you're younger okay you don't no one's an elf did you just call me an elf it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice [Applause] should we fake your death he's trying to tear this whole thing apart like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga um like is there any steaks I said shakes or steaks what's up everybody and welcome to flagrant and today we are joined by Mr b6000 yeah it's funny because I don't have that name anymore wait why don't you have it did you abort it or something oh my God this is a great one uh yes welcome to flagrant I'm here because I had nothing better to do good that's the best reason to be here and uh and we're happy about it and we're just hoping that by the end of this episode I make the same amount of money as I did coming into the episode yeah I mean ideally but I'll just take the same fair enough you know we just don't lose a brand I mean you actually operate at a loss though based on your Rogan so we can do that oh yeah we can do that no problem that's true yeah but that's why if it dips it's a bigger loss you have the most brilliant way of saying that you make lots of money I agree but how no you say I make all this money and then you're like but I spend it all yeah but you still get to say that you make it yeah yeah so no one can really [ __ ] with you when it comes to making the money well I don't spend the money that's to you know for that reason but I guess that is true yeah if it does make it easier when people are like do you make a couple million a month like yeah because I just spend it all so it does make it exactly because if I did it if I was like oh yeah just make a couple million and that was the end then I just seemed like a douchebag exactly yes I do agree but I never really thought about it that way I did thank you you're like Adam Sandler in that way it's not like a multi-millionaire but you're like one of the guys still oh I like them like usually like really rich people you know we want to eat them yeah they buy speedsters and uh yeah and mansions and go on vacations to them all fees twice watches yeah and watches yeah yeah it's a replica right gambling degenerative are you one of the rich people they want to eat are you I'm not that rich not yet you are way more Rich than me uh but I I give my money away I'm poor yeah I give my money to my wife so what's your matter I feel like your fiscal policy is going to completely change once you get yeah yeah yeah yeah just giving away stuff all the time like yeah do more reaction videos from the kitchen yeah that's the reason is there a uh Mrs Beast there is we've only been dating like six months okay my boy how long have you been married don't do that it's media training yeah that was very good uh I've been married since the 18th of December no no December 18th I got married right decision really yes I recommend you do it and you don't need a place because you don't make any money okay did you get one did I get a prenup yeah she got me gonna regret that whatever something happens I know at least like three people who got one and I was friends with them when they got married and then like two of them you know didn't work out and every single one it's just interesting to see it go from like yeah we'll be together forever to like [ __ ] this is the worst decision of my life did you did you think about giving them some money uh because that'd be a great video this money yeah yeah just helping my friend who just got divorced tell you know the people at our food banks like less money this month gotta help my divorce they would actually get it they'd be like yeah they probably would he needs it he's probably waiting in line next to them yeah yeah is one of your friends that got divorced here uh no definitely not these 18 year olds no children Tara could have a child bride or something like that no not exactly sure [Laughter] um now you brought your son here bring your kids to work day yeah yeah now is that uncomfortable at all for you about to have my kids here yeah no and bring them back to work this is getting so uncomfortable we just wanted to give Carl a shout out we love Carl we're Big Carl fans here okay so you make millions and millions and millions of dollars who cares right yeah sure I make money because it's so much money you make just tons I don't know what to do with it you don't even know what to do with it no greed okay we don't I don't know okay but that's the fun thing yeah so it's just so much [ __ ] money okay and then you're giving it away constantly yep right and then More's coming in yeah and giving it away it's basically what I did like we I just had this Theory what well hopefully the Ponzi scheme never implodes got you like you know positive schemes are great up until they just go bust but no I had this idea when I was like 18 I was like when I made a couple thousand dollars a month I was like What if I just give it away and just try to make a little bit more than a couple thousand and then I just was like oh that worked and then I did it again yeah and I've done it every month ever since and I'm just like oh well it just works and it's like a couple Grand turned into 10 turned into 100 turn in a million it just keeps going up and I'm like oh now when when you ever did like the challenges where you're giving away to your guys if they win yeah were you ever worried that you would make them not really want to work that should be stimulus no no uh no especially when we were doing a lot they act different when they make like 150 grams yeah we're doing a lot of them hey they were like 10 grand or 20 grand and this was like Chris just left his job at Best Buy Tariq literally got I tried to hire Teri and he said no and then he went to work at a hospital then a year later he's like I'm depressed and I was like come on over most of them though like were just new and had like no money so like back then when they were fighting those challenges like that was like basically at the time so that's why uh but yeah you do see as time went on they didn't go as long the challenges and that's when obviously we transitioned to people like random people like at the start I wouldn't hook the boys up and then once they were good we're like okay let's start doing we can just start doing other people okay talk about hooking up uh when you're on Rogan you no no no you you brought up the fact that when you posted your first video it was when you got hacked playing uh Pirates battle pirates yeah whatever yeah have you found out who did it no I didn't but I should have they not reached out how would they Mr b6000 is their username right yes what are they gonna tweet me on Twitter like yeah you can do a YouTube video about it I'm Olivia's highest viewed video okay because because the story don't tell the story about like all of five people listening we're gonna [ __ ] the algorithm up already yeah you did [ __ ] your attention you know what um it's fine you know if you don't want this to your views that's up to you so um you're his son you're so true he starts this off with like oh by the way Joe Rogan got 10 million views and you know what goes through my head when he says I was like well it's completely up to the topics you bring up on whether or not we do it no I mean if this gets like a 40 minute retention we're passing that if this is like 25 minutes we're screwed yeah yeah so now we're down there okay so make this story I guess you know it gives a [ __ ] about a guy that hacked me when I was 11 years old on Facebook [ __ ] them our audience is actually uh older than 17. so why don't you go ahead they're insistent okay so when I was 11 I was playing the game a guy just started just destroying me absolutely crushing me every day he had to come through and attack my face and I got pissed so I made a video saying [ __ ] this guy although why there was no words I didn't know how to record audio I was stupid but it was just like him I just sent it to the devs and I uploaded it to YouTube and then it somehow got 20 000 views first video ever gets twenty thousand that's crazy because people who played the game would just watch it but they were trying to figure out how to hack and then like all the comments were like oh so there's a guy out there that's responsible for you posting on YouTube yeah for making pissing me off when I was 11 and then inadvertently making me make a video and he could be listening right now what do you want to say to that guy um thanks for making me Rich he needs a royalty name something I found out who he is would you break him off with a little something yeah of course I give him a couple thousand dollars what do you mean couple thousand that's at least a million right yeah no get him on it dude [ __ ] that guy oh you want to play Pirates now watch this that's a great question when when you're buried alive like do you guys ever think about like him being mean as a boss oh tell them your plan for if you die oh yeah they want me to die oh yeah 100 great video big time they do because the second I died yeah um Carl Chandler Chris the three guys Nolan maybe he's a little newer we haven't decided if he partakes yet or not yeah uh they all put their hand in my Tombstone last take it off gets the channel Everything 100 everything oh what about it dude you just left the brown guy out of this he's not on care he's the camera guy so like most people haven't seen him I mean I don't know what do you think Tariq gets to put his hand on the tombstone yes I think so as of right now it's just written in the like little plan it's just those three we have to update it and put Nolan and maybe Tariq in it yes it's like because we have a little gameplay so you know they can film the video yeah that is happening mark my words I don't even know if I've really said it publicly I tweeted it one time but I'm serious I don't give a [ __ ] how much you guys are cry right put their [ __ ] hands on the tombstone and give the channel to whoever wins okay and don't bully them for it they're just doing what I want and and you guys think you could do without him right like an interesting experiment I'm down should we fake your death dude oh [ __ ] no just like I want to do this the next 10 years and if I do that then like if I fake that did I pick count to 100 000. good point good point you can't take anything okay uh hold on real quick real quick most illegal go for it no uh most illegal video honestly I try to brainstorm legal videos so yeah that's probably a better use of your time okay um what about what about like a competition like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay is that the notepad you're flipping yeah yeah yeah yeah go ahead rip it up three that I for the podcast he's just slide through okay um this is a good tell me if you think this has good one retention and good like uh click through okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga that could work um like is there any steaks say again like anything on the line uh I said shakes or steaks I just got Invisalign all right my s's are not gonna come off correctly like maybe if it's like losers car gets hit by a meteor or something that's a good one that's good I like that okay oh okay wait a hundred kids go to an island last one leaves gets an internship with Jeffrey Epstein thoughts right he's dead or is he I haven't seen the body um yeah it's a banger that's right I don't know but yeah for the right reasons but you know get clicks it's probably by the FBI okay you were investigated by the FBI was that well that's what we're wondering oh no I was hunted by them for a video were they really hunting someone else in your crew you want to inform me do you know something I don't I think we know who he's looking at I don't know he's looking at Carl I was looking at Carl I was looking at Carl's dad and nobody else hey hey bro I'm gonna need you to respect Tariq yeah I do okay all right I'm gonna have to walk up yeah yeah you respect to people were spectators one trillion dollars I give you right now uh okay I have to spend it on the video okay what is it uh I bought everything I wanted in life and I just buy everything everything I don't think I get you to a trillion dog I'm gonna be honest now humans are expensive bro like oh I can figure it out people are like you couldn't spend a billion a day if you wanted to [ __ ] 10 super Yachts problem solved I could I could spend a trillion okay I'm just calling up like people who own neighborhoods buying entire neighborhoods you know wow I could figure it out one trillion you buy everything you want in life yeah I would just literally buy like half of America why not have you look into buying a planet uh uh no I mean like they're so far away you know how much cooler it is if planets weren't like 500 000 light years away there's like a realistic way we could visit them in our life yeah I feel like we'd all be way happier yeah yeah we'll just get out of here for a little bit it won't just stress Our Lives it's more fun yeah yeah but it's like you have to like build a ship and send it off and people have to have kids on it and kids and their kids will maybe see that planet it's kind of lame yeah yeah thing I mean that's what your boy's trying to do at least yeah Elon yeah yeah my boy did you believe him when he made that offer what offer if something bad happens to him oh on Twitter I love dude you did your research you think that you're gonna come on this bro my journalistic Integrity oh yeah he thinks he's a journalist but I'm a journalist bro really yeah well then you need to make up some lies that sounds good yeah yeah well first he has to buy it and then yeah I'm very confident if he bought it and died he'd give it to me totally and not the ambassadors that have tens of billions of dollars in it hmm that's a bad enemy to make though I wouldn't have made that deal with you what that oh if I I own Twitter if I die if I die then you get it the guy that is making videos and doing crazy could you imagine someone assassinates him but then like the holy motive I wonder who it could be okay and then they just want to assassinate him yeah they get a [ __ ] YouTube channel but what would you even do with Twitter I mean I don't know sell it's worth a lot of money Give It Away give it give it to a subscribers get some money oh no you stop being poor help him okay because he doesn't need help he he doesn't believe in philanthropy oh no I do believe no no you don't believe in places we've talked about this word on the streets you hate plenty I don't hate it I believe in it um what do you donate to say again we've talked about this a million I donated to Catholic Church I donated sperm for like the first maybe like no it's not three years [Laughter] I believe in philanthropy you've literally never done it I do believe in it he believes in it as an idea he just hasn't gotten around to it no I think I believe when you do it I think you do it yeah yeah wait I believe it you believe him I believe people do it what do you mean I don't know can I believe it and also not do it look I'm saying Jimmy donates millions of dollars every year he plants trees yeah he helps people yes food pantries yeah and you also have a lump of money yeah that you could use to help other people and why don't you um I I feel like you're doing a good job like if everybody what if I have a burger and I have chocolate and I'm giving everybody money and I'm giving everybody Islands you know what I mean your changes how many [ __ ] white oprahs do we need there we go I should give more man yeah agreed why why when did you start giving when I was like 15. oh you started young yeah that's the problem The Habit has been built yeah yeah exactly we're too old to start we got money ladies yeah yeah perfectly logical reason more importantly yeah everyone always talks about obviously you yo yo yo can you stop bullying us no He's a Bully but I love it this guy's a bully dude yeah yeah bro you're a [ __ ] on his side well I'm just saying I didn't realize son of a [ __ ] did you realize he's taller than you two he's the bullet everyone how tall are you wow all right okay your Netflix special that you you know sold on your own and you made more than they would have paid you yeah have you ever was with Netflix but yeah yeah have you ever like said how much money was publicly or anything like that no I haven't do you ever plan on it just every time I hear it I'm always curious like even on the car right over I like was thinking about I was like uh just how much did you [ __ ] on Netflix you know well this guy's good it's not I didn't say it was Netflix Oh wait really yeah I thought that was the whole thing everybody found it was Netflix I never said which one it is he's never revealed that bro I was beyond certain it was Netflix I don't [ __ ] know because he looks at the stock market Netflix is like here's a three million bang yeah delete some jokes and you're like [ __ ] you and then you made like 20 million and you just shat on them I didn't make 20 million yeah obviously that was just the number I put on my head but yeah what's happening yeah if I want bro do you plan on telling us how badly you should on said streaming service I I plan on just taking a moment [ __ ] an [ __ ] dude you just threw out 20 like it was nothing bro I apologize yeah I'm gonna talk [ __ ] man that's it now I'm putting it on YouTube because you said that what the number I'm gonna put the whole special on YouTube there and he's gonna donate his money and I'm gonna donate the money hold on to it hold on to it I'm gonna donate to who you said I'm gonna donate it to me and my wife I'm gonna donate to us and then when you get a divorce you'll get half of it [ __ ] [Laughter] [Laughter] any other [ __ ] questions no but I want that story we were talking about beforehand yeah about the yeah so when he was uh going through video ideas it reminded me of someone who just I can't remember if it was Dubai or somewhere in the Middle East this guy hired a private investigator in North Carolina I have no context to find me um and this is just something that happens yeah someone this happens a lot so whenever people call local private investigators they just let us know because a lot of people just want to know where I am for whatever reason oh the private investigators call you directly yeah it's usually which now I'm giving away my secrets but oh well I'm In Too Deep but yeah um so he calls us lets us know he's like this time it's someone from like Dubai we don't really know what he wants but he's just flying to North Carolina tomorrow and he just paid me to find you and we're like okay cool um and so then the next day he gets there and then with the private I have security somebody's security woman to private investigator to meet him and my Security's just like why the [ __ ] are you here why are you trying to find Jimmy and the guy's like I just have video ideas I really want to give them and my security is like [ __ ] you why are you actually here he's he just kept saying it like 30 times in a row he's just like I just want to give him the sheet of ideas so it's just a piece of paper with video ideas flies across the world private investigator everything instead of like we don't believe you and so they like he let them my security search his hotel room couldn't find anything nothing in there just a suitcase of clothes um and he's just literally just did all that to give me a list of ideas and then and then well my security was like oh Jimmy's out of town for three months did you ever get the [ __ ] yeah well then just get took it I was like I'll give it to Jimmy and then he gave it to me and it was just like it was like open up a free gas station like open that's actually that's a very Middle Eastern idea yeah he's trying to make money off you it was like 30 ideas like that and I was just like this is actually a lot of women read in public or something like that we we did get squid game out of that [ __ ] yeah [ __ ] I sold a guy from Dubai's idea this is before the real squid game that's the game yeah no he wrote it all out yeah this guy just hired private investigators flew down there all this muddy camped out just to give me a list of video ideas and none of them were good none of them were good I got I got plenty of ideas yeah yeah I need ideas give me the Dubai ideas it's much easier to fly here at the North Carolina do you have a lot of people uh doing that like uh just okay you hear the stories of people going like I risk everything to be here like I saw Carl's story of like I spent my last dollar and then I ended up working out and that kind of inspires every lunatic to take their last dollar yeah to just show up I just I live in my studio now yeah so it's like fin stand and stuff that's and most people know that so they don't but sometimes you know the gym in the bedroom but sometimes I'll go out and they'll just be like yeah this guy's just been camping behind a gas station for like a month waiting to see you and I'm like lovely and how do you say I just like tell him I'm just not interested like that's not how you know I like to meet people but that's still like occasionally happens and it's always like that never pissed them off because you're not like I mean that's not the nicest I'm not I don't think anyone expects me to just go and be people who just can't battle wait for my attention because you don't know like they might be trying to kill me they might be whatever yeah so it used to be it's weird I like hostiles sometimes it's like a lot and then sometimes it's not as much yeah have you ever had a dangerous moment like with your security where they had to intervene and like get someone off you um dangerous car can you think of one uh not really no nobody cares enough yeah you know Baxter's ever a crowd of five people is it ever women waiting to see okay Mr Beast no I usually um no but we've never had any like crazy issues it's actually kind of weird like with the mall one like that went really well even though like crazy yeah at one point there's like 20 000 people in there yeah and girls showing tits and [ __ ] these are jokes these are videos these are children really they're screenshots in the video of like of girls like flashing I hope not yeah no that was nuts it was crazy yeah and they had like the the American flag like pasties or whatever like that this is not true you didn't see this it's on it's there was a whole quibby series that they made about is that what it was nope turn the phone when within five seconds of using quibby I want to watch the show and I was like this is garbage I went to screenshot and the screenshot was black yeah and that's how I knew it would fail because you can't make memes they made it where you couldn't take screenshots of anything Netflix's problem too yeah well at least Netflix like you can watch it on your computer and it's easier to screenshot yeah clivia was phone only and there's zero way to take a screenshot okay so it's like how the [ __ ] do you expect these shows to go viral yeah like that was the same time of baby Yoda and all this stuff and then quibby's just like no no memes yeah and it's like no one's ripping your [ __ ] shows can you explain that a little bit more about how like memes Drive the culture of 100 yeah like the Mandalorian you get rid of baby Yoda memes it's like nobody even talks about it exactly I I never would watch it now when you're creating videos here you also going like what do you think will be memeable in this uh I probably should but no but no yeah right now I'm just film and TV like film TV it's what is memeable no not only it's just it's just something that happens naturally if you're just kidding or no one can take screenshots and you're just an idiot you know I mean because that's how you just get attention on Twitter it's like cutting one of your legs out for money yeah if you try to make a meme then your cringe like memes just happen yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you mean like if you're the creator of the TV show like The House of dragons is going this is the memeable moment exactly you I don't think you can ever do that you can't force them you can embrace it though after it's like organically possible lean in yeah yeah I think you have to yeah that like what is that movie morbius or whatever yeah movie that got absolutely destroyed yeah did you see there but it still did well right I don't know I'm pretty sure like the destroying it caused it to they put it back out in theaters oh really it went viral as like a meme and they're like we're re-releasing it opinion says well with the like people actually I was enjoyed though yeah you did that you did yeah we did we bought every ticket in a theater and then we just flooded with people in suits oh it's amazing it's great and I heard they made that [ __ ] illegal yeah like they did a few places yeah it's like for the first seven three years I go to a movie theater and then like three days later it's like no you can't do that also like uh the most mature way to dress yeah right yeah it has a very cultish feel to it though just a bunch of young white kids in suits and whatever yo yeah this is scary you're saying if there's like a bunch of white people all dressed the same you would like to make you feel uncomfortable a little bit I wonder if I walked in and it was just a hundred black people in suits how I would feel yeah Men In Black because I think the New Mexico Studios what's going on yeah that is wild I don't know why that is concerning it shouldn't be illegal but it does make you literally because some of them started lighting firecrackers in the movie theater and one of them like blew up a couple seats I told you man it's a dangerous thing you can't trust that many white people just the same why we get out of it we get out of hand you get yeah you get one group thinking it's just a it's just a mob also yeah yeah but it is fun see me and then we break it up so it's not too much white boy [ __ ] going on yeah yeah so every time Mark and I are starting to get hyped about things yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not good that's actually a really good idea that's why fatic is a part of the team so that's it gotcha too much fun he's not good we keep his camera off he's like Sid Vicious we don't even use it yeah you're content made it but just in case you guys start going you want to go to Charlottesville he's like everybody chill out this is very important that's how you build your team oh that's smart Teresa Foundation right yes okay this is good are they allowed to have girlfriends is the team allowed to have girlfriends I wish not but you know if they want to are they just drowning in strange or what oh my gosh let's cut over time boy [Laughter] dude okay girl I didn't know you had it like that my voice [Music] [Laughter] Nola's got a little something going on I know 100 right chain out by the way yeah oh I love it some wild [ __ ] boys you got over here oh [ __ ] crazy again what are you guys do on a Saturday like split a six-pack of white claws dude all right well I don't I just work all the time yeah yeah so I usually see them when we're filming but outside that I don't see them too much anymore okay how do you split the work balance with your girl you've introduced this relationship in last time yeah that's what US married guys want to know yeah I got you guys the answers you've been needing she's actually from South Africa so she can only come here 90 days a year anyways so it just naturally Works itself out [Music] African-American uh I'm working on it a white woman and African-American oh there's your video wedding episode it is a little weird that like like she makes good money she's like gone to college multiple degrees everything you would want you would want her here yeah but I still feel like there's just literally no way to get her in America like you why don't we like reform our immigration process we're like yeah we should let in the good ones right who said that why are you making it bad why are you making it bad you're twisting I don't want my girlfriend you've been doing this to him for an hour okay um but you can marry her and then she's in yeah I'll just marry her yeah that seems like a reasonable way you could actually have Nolan do it no one could marry your guy it would be a great video is that like a company could I just pay someone to marry her yeah yeah really is that like it's not a company but no one can do it are you thinking about I don't know what like if she has to marry someone I see on it you know this is a little bit but if it doesn't do anything but it feels just like some guy that I'll never see again and they just like marry so she can move here like but he might try something no no one's an elf look at that like he's not gonna do anything yeah but the problem is no one will make fun of me but the thing is because there's a lot of the Rings call me an elf yeah [Music] it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice it's a compliment cookies in a tree that's what he's saying no Lord of the Rings bro I've seen Lord of the Rings I just don't know what I look like you know the people that you're like my family no no not your ears your [ __ ] head and your skin and your yes your beauty [Laughter] married to my girlfriend maybe he's not doing nothing yeah but he's got that over himself no he doesn't win a single argument anymore that's it why what happened because I'm married to your girlfriend but then you can also look at that do you know who that is Legolas yes yeah yeah yeah [Laughter] wait what else do we got in here yeah yeah yeah I was surprised you're not grabbing your phone back wait you're gonna let him look him look at your photos yeah yeah yeah it can't happen no yeah okay you you guys should trade phones that'd be fun oh me and you yeah do you want to do that ah I feel like he's just gonna like go through my YouTube analytics and start blurting out numbers well I maybe that's actually a great idea actually probably he wasn't good do you want me to help you with that I I could use the help that'd be great I mean we could work on some TMS are you the behind the scenes guy no it's all it's awesome [Laughter] yeah are you logged into the show's channel yeah what are we doing right now wait hold on hold on hold on what are we doing here we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy bro no you're killing it crazy guys he's a good job I keep up the good work you know what I will not compliment you the rest yeah he's gonna give you advice and then you're gonna give him your parents loved you and you're younger you don't know someone abused this man and he just doesn't know how to take us off I'm proud of you for having two million subscribers wow and he's like what the [ __ ] did you just say I was like I'm proud wow okay Solomon over here bro yeah you could tell the accuracy by how fast we both did Jesus Christ my Dad loved me at least you know hey Mom still stepped it up a little bit so it's RPM's a little how do we get that up yeah yeah what'd he say RPM RPMs yeah I've been working on those yeah yeah you definitely I love the RPM so you swear a lot in the video say again you swear a lot in the videos I I wouldn't no you did I could tell you dude just look at the revenue I don't swear you have to I don't swear it wouldn't be this love you didn't swear racist a lot but that's not cussing gotcha do you know what I mean yeah a substitute like you know oh you're saying say things that are wrong yeah you say things that you know advertisers naughty yes but we have great advertisers the numbers it's just funny that like I could never looking for a chocolate bar sponsorship actually can we sponsor the next one yeah how do you charge an episode for you yeah free oh philanthropy thank you yeah you almost said Felicia it's only one other time okay palette of chocolate right there matter of fact we need to replace the trees we will replace it with a paddle of chocolate matter of fact matter of fact I've been wanting to try your burger let's see how fast are the Beast Burgers usually come go Mark uh uh probably 30 minutes 30 minutes well we might get them a little quicker uh what are they here is it only hamburgers or do you have anything for people who aren't going uh yeah he doesn't eat beef we have a grilled cheese oh that sounds fun I'm working on oh no we have impossible meat as well okay I forgot we launched that it's just like three percent of our sales like no one gives a [ __ ] I was like really expecting people to [ __ ] with the plant-based first we were friends you know what I mean I thought we had a thing and we just [ __ ] on him together no what this that's nothing it's just in general America just doesn't give a [ __ ] thank you yeah because I was like really hoping that would like explode and like no one cared about the impossible me yeah and we also did like lettuce wraps where you can substitute the bun for a letter that sounds great like that yeah that sounds fun when people want a burger they want a burger that's what I found out the hardware what's up guys today's episode is sponsored by surf shark surf shark is a modern VPN design with the user in mind their utilities are powered by a robust security mechanism but designed to be simple intuitive to use enjoy all the freedoms of an open internet safely and 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back to the show look at this how long have these been sitting around hold on one second because if they say these are bad it's not my fault no we got some real Beast Burgers okay this is it Mr Beast that old ass packaging oh oh God here we go wait a minute okay this is weird that looks awful like a Big Mac s Special Sauce it looks like a Big Mac dude I mean when you order we order from McDonald's cheese lettuce onions oh what is this it looked like two old beef patties mustard sauce pickles cheese lettuce I just thought it says hasn't been opened yeah so this is a Big Mac then you guys really move it off how are you going to use my card and not get an impossible Burger you can eat beef why not oh I mean it's impossible this is a beast Burger this is what happens when you hang out with comedian yes okay so these do look like Big Mac so that is a big mac oh that is yeah oh so that's what the Beast burger no you can't help your [ __ ] you but no don't know what's going on let me see this he uses ghost kitchens right oh this one though that looks more like her that's what hold on let me okay that's it hold on hold on hold on dude do you have like a do you have like a team that we could call like an HR son that's crazy because we didn't do that you did no we did not swear there's not a coincidence that the ones without the stickers are Big Macs and the ones with the stickers not opened aren't [Laughter] yeah it looks like it's been centered around a little bit but it looks good I'm gonna take a bite right now it's not my fault if it's been sitting out for an hour is there money in there oh no I'm not gonna lie I have fire it's got fries on it um that's bar hey that's Chandler so whoever's on our marketing team make an ad of him saying that and just run it all over that's fine just Target everyone within 100 mile radius of this or anyone that goes to a show just hit him with Instagram ads if I'm going that's far I think that's [ __ ] fire right there what do you rate that one out of ten burger burger review honestly down down honestly no not honestly guys while you're ready I'm honest with you right now this needs a little more sauce okay probably because it's been sitting around a little bit it's dried up oh yeah you this this the version they ordered is the one with no sauce well you don't need to throw it like that that's the old factory they need to update it they need to update that [ __ ] yeah agree [ __ ] that package agreed what's wrong with Angry Birds Packaging Patty yeah excellent I agree Patty is excellent dare I say the best you've ever had for fast food okay dude I'm an in and out Enthusiast I feel the return retention you know just give us the rating so we can love it holy [ __ ] that's reduction step it up bro miles the single please one out of ten all right you know what I'll take it if it saves the podcast it's just hardwired you can't spend a decade of your life studying how to go violent how to get people to watch the video and then have it fire bomb in front of your eyes to not like hurt your soul yeah so you think about that with everything yeah it'd be like the same as if I started doing stand up there and it was just god-awful you would be like I gotta like what about during sex do you ever be like oh my God I'm starting to look around the room a little bit like Africa would be nice to be back right now it's been more than three minutes I think we got enough RPMs so is there a collab burger or food product that we the flagrant Beast products yeah I know [Music] [Laughter] [Laughter] so Jimmy gave you some advice on your channel we'll suck less yeah um what is uh what's your advice for his channel oh number one uh plane crash video very close to 911. I intentionally made sure we did not upload in September they were like you know we might need more time I was like you don't have more time [Applause] I was like this is like we're a couple days away from September like that's so funny it's like no one gives you advice on your channel so this is gonna be a perfect tons of advice every time I upload I get like 40 phone calls from people tell me how it could be about it is there somebody you watch that you still learn a lot from on YouTube that you're like oh that guy I could learn from uh I mean everyone like even like anybody more than anyone else anybody no it changes it's just like I just like watching random Youtube videos and like even like a homeless person on the street you can learn something from like how to be more humble or what what it's like for someone who's struggling so like if you apply that same mindset to videos like every video you watch there's something you can learn especially if it has a million views like there's a reason it got a million views okay I could give you the dumb dick joke answer Alex didn't believe that you got buried oh you didn't no interesting he had a whole reason for why you didn't get buried I kind of forgot you don't just forget yourself this is the most viewed video You're questioning my existence yeah exactly I'm just saying the camera angles made it seem as though oh I could have fixed it I remember this whoa I know and I think you're you're worth too much to take that risk uh yeah my mom was like crying when I filmed this video I was like Mom I promise we did the math um let me skip to over here to show you there's a scene where the boys literally dig down and yeah see that penis sign yeah they literally dug down and put that there yeah uh so you you could have planned wait wait right here oh Carl wait wait for the cut right here look you can literally see where they put the sign there and how deep it is underground or that could have just been shot at a different time where whoa Carl is on to us what if like to Arena like Brandon here it was like hey Jimmy I need you really uncomfortable yeah okay with this video specifically okay yeah um well there's two I'm curious about for the same reason this the one where you're in the the outdoor pool and you're under underwater yeah the thing bro that was done like five years ago this yeah the headache yeah have you figured out what that was about yeah it's because uh I was an idiot back then in the like we were pumping air in but the CO2 or whatever the [ __ ] you it doesn't get pumped out yeah getting pumped out yeah so you're just inhaling your own carbon yeah and so then when I started getting a headache I was like oh [ __ ] and then dioxide yeah yeah carbon dioxide so then we like called someone who know what they're doing they're like yeah you're an idiot yeah yeah okay and I just got out immediately okay and then when you're buried under this is what we learned from it so we had a pump that was pumping in air and pumping out the old Air what was the most catastrophic thought you had while you were completely buried I uh tried there was a camera at my feet three could also talk about this too uh and I went to like go adjust it and I couldn't so I like literally turned around and I'm you know not super flexible so I literally like was going to turn and so like I'm laying like this and as I'm like Disney I got caught like halfway and I was like [ __ ] I'm [ __ ] I'm fine I was literally like guys if I can't get out of this in two seconds you start digging right the [ __ ] now because I was like cotton is super awkward position like in the thing and I just like I'm gonna give it one last try and I just pushed as hard as I could and I popped out the other end and then I adjusted the camera and then you had to get back exactly because have my because it's like the thing got Slimmer this way yeah it was so uncomfortable on that side yeah so then I had to do it again and I almost got stuck again like what was going through your head when you were watching it Mike this was the first time he like panicked during the whole situation yeah we got really scared no did you calculate how much time it would take to excavate yeah they knew that because uh I mean it was like they could get me out in under five minutes if I really needed to be I okay I started practicing with my hand on the tombstone [Laughter] I see you this feels good it feels real good yeah so any of these other ones up here you think are fake no I just thought that one I think you counting to 100. he set his sights on you he's about to start [ __ ] on you well he's like I think your [ __ ] shoes are fake or fake easy so subreddits would go crazy exposing me and I just didn't care and I thought it was the funniest thing ever that's so smart and then I wore a fake Supreme shirt in a video same thing Reddit just lost their mind and I just I just love doing it to piss him off I mean it also keeps you in the conversation even more though no it's just funny to like watch them analyze the box logo and why it's not real you also save money you don't have to buy that's true yeah I'm still terrified about this buried alive dude I'm I'm severely claustrophobic wow oh yeah severely close so the nights before I slept in a coffin in my garage to like oh you get used here yeah emo phase too so you put a little effort in so there's just this coffin in my cold ass garage and I just lay in it close it chill there for a couple hours do you like consult with people about this first that one David Blaine yeah interesting because he did a week so I was gonna do 24 hours Bear live and then I called David and I was like I'm gonna bury myself for 24 hours and he's like that's it and I said all right I'm doing it for 50 hours and that's why it's 50 hours instead of 24. yeah but did you see his dumbass balloon thing who is he to judge I mean that's pretty cool whatever the balloon oh he just flew in a balloon it was like upper he held on to balloons flew up and then popped him came down yeah it was pretty cool but yeah that's so I I had to double it because he just basically Shadow my entire existence I mean we would have been fine if you did 24 hours just the Buried Alive thing like what is the the oxygen tank malfunctioned I couldn't handle being stuck in an elevator for 24 seconds there's enough oxygen in there for five minutes yeah I guess you're right we had so we buried that cop in like five separate times we had you know David Blaine Consulting a bunch of other people Consulting I was probably safer under there than I was above ground I think that's what they told me yeah yeah I don't know if that's true the dirt on the glass and you realize it's like this much glass between you and just thousands of pounds of dirt then it's like well [ __ ] oh that's right if it eats a little bit of a crack did you hear any weird sounds so terrified I'm sure I heard tons of stuff oh but we tried to keep it upbeat and not like I was super scared so like in the video I don't think we really put that kind of stuff did that help you get less scared knowing so many people are watching if you get scared it's kind of embarrassing whatever so that kind of blocks out that no that whole time I was just like for the love of God don't crack like because all I did was stare up at that dirt and so I just saw six thousand ten thousand whatever thousand pounds of dirt the whole time for like 50 hours straight and it hurts like [ __ ] like the bottom is just wood so you're just like that in of itself is a gem like you're just like laying on wood it was it wasn't fun but you know 194 million views not that bad I would do it again yeah what was the worst one to do the one you would never do again um that's a great way let me flip through these no buried alive I do again a heartbeat that wasn't like in the grand scheme of things it wasn't too crazy uh 50 hours in solitary you can find me don't seem that bad no well after you're married that seems like a kind of a vacation yeah now you have the [ __ ] Goofy Goobers over here torturing you and they won't let me sleep or do anything uh okay no Carl what's the hard one there's what I I say all the time but I'm just drawing blank well it's not counted before I was nice maybe yes I spent 25 hours a night that was miserable I you couldn't pay me to do that anymore what do you mean we just built a house that ice and I just spent 24 hours in it were you wearing something they would like pants like this and like a short sleeve shirt it was brutal I was like shivering all night it was one of those ones like 10 hours in I was like I'm too invested to quit but currently wouldn't do it that was like Peak grind me where I was like you know I'll do things as long as you know I'm not putting my life in danger like which we had man that's the widest thing you've done really love not being cold it's like a thing I've noticed is why people walk around yeah yeah let's go yeah that that's your whitest sitting in ice for 24 hours yeah yeah that was fruit how many views did they get uh like 100 million it kind of flopped I'm just kidding what is a flop for you now um if a video doesn't get like 50 million views it kind of sucks so but that's in English and then we dub them in other languages I love this yeah have you seen the Espanol Channel yeah yeah you should do that we yeah yeah so that one's been crushing we just hit 20 million you know what's weird is I bet people already were doing that for your videos yeah they were especially in like Japan for some reason yeah people used to upload their videos like crazy and they get millions of views yeah yeah so then that's why we just started doing it but the way that you guys do it is smart where you get the actors that are known the exactly well there's a huge secondary market for Mr Beast videos so like we'd come up with an original idea whatever like I don't know press this button 100 Grand and then the next day you'd see people on Spanish-speaking communities Japan Russia all over the world do the exact same video so part of this as well like everyone would just rip off our videos around the world because that was like a huge strategy like people at all these countries or just see who can copy our English videos first in their country and now that we do this like the rate of that has decreased a lot wow I wonder fake Supreme t-shirt exactly yeah exactly if people do that with our stand-up oh 100 they do There's a comic I'll leave his name out but um it was like huge in France and apparently he was just using Seinfeld's material I'm talking about oh but I'll tell you after I think he was just like using Seinfeld's material and then they became friends really yeah because Seinfeld is such a [ __ ] Maniac he was like this guy's got great taste like if he's gonna if he's gonna steal something he steals from the best and then they became buddies but he was like a huge comic there how crazy is that I've never heard Seinfeld I love Utah no no no I love you dude yeah that's the best thing you've said on this whole podcast do you know who he is even well I know because you got Tariq talks about comedians all the time yeah but but you but whatever right no he's a non-factor right like explain like to me like like a non I'm pretty he's in um he has a show that's that's on no no but no no he does I know you're [ __ ] with me you don't know how much you hate Seinfeld yeah yeah yeah I don't hate him but I just think he's whatever but the fact that the fact that you don't even know keep going about this like talk me through this like what are you feeling about emotionally retention through the roof right now this is going okay guys just like Drake talks about him and that's about it but he has a show or like what is this thing like isn't it I think I'm gonna sound dumb isn't it like Better Call Saul or something like that or no yes yes what is wait the show is Seinfeld yeah okay gotcha but that's okay his show is actually called Breaking Bad yeah yeah yeah yeah but go on go on go on but yeah okay yeah no Andrew I need you to ask him about movies he's never seen an entire movie in his one movie in his entire life I grew up on YouTube this guy's never seen movies yeah it was because he was homeschooled this was different with you right uh yeah no I just thought it was waste did you have chickenpox as a kid oh my gosh probably you just had shingles like a couple months ago so that means shingles means you've had chickenpox oh yeah it's the same virus though yeah yeah so there you go yes Mark just had chickenpox at the ripe age of 25 years old who are you to talk what are you talking about a compromised immune system I know same same way oh really no it's Crohn's oh you got Crohn's yeah can you eat your Burgers uh yeah those are fine it's mostly just I don't know I'm just so heavily medicated it's like in remission right now but if I wasn't on medicine it would be different oh what type of meds uh Remicade not that anyone knows what that is you ever do a Remicade at a party one time no but if you ever tried a Tesla ecstasy pill because that's [ __ ] amazing are you public about doing drugs dude love them literally I was like yeah I'm on my way over he's like is it like an X that's what is it ecstasy Etsy that's where people make [ __ ] you drugs yeah I'm a Christian boy I don't do drugs he's like okay okay I didn't know if you were [ __ ] with me or not because like you'd also like he's going back and forth with like being very sarcastic and then like very serious in the text so I have no [ __ ] we've never spoken on the phone before at all and like so we're on the phone we're on the group text with Tariq and he's like listen we need to kick Tariq out of the room immediately after he comes here I go okay that's fine and then he messaged me on the side he goes I would like to talk to you privately but the joke was that Tariq just loves you guys and so I was all that stupid [ __ ] I was saying and there was to embarrass him because he is he cringing in the back of the car and I remember so I just say some dumb [ __ ] to you like yeah I don't [ __ ] care or whatever and then I just looked back and he's just like hey hey you're a good guy dude Tark you're a good guy hey thank you and we're gonna pronounce your name right every single time yeah okay appreciate it guys appreciate it 100 you are a good Christian boy though is it true that your old YouTube Banner used to be like a Bible verse it did I used to go to a Christian School back in the day oh yeah but now it's like it's just kind of hard to tell what's right or what's wrong like religion wise there's so many and I don't know I believe there is some kind of God but how do you know damn Mark just got so sorry right [Laughter] because he's such a [ __ ] Catholic oh is that why you donate to the Catholic Church yeah yeah he bullish you no he calls that my paycheck that's what it is yeah yeah he gives me money hey I have his Revenue up here I mean he could probably make some more donations I think so donations right but for so so have your feelings changed since tark's been around or like has he are you expanding the caliph oh my gosh Jesus it is admirable to see how devoted he is though yeah like he doesn't he doesn't drink he doesn't do anything he he's actually he's not one of those people that just preach it he actually follows it sometimes it does make me go like damn like there's something there like he really cares a lot you know it's easier we're busy guys okay five times a day he gets his five minutes I'm just saying this guy Titanic have you seen it no I haven't seen it at all was it that before I was born before I was 18 I didn't even listen to music because I was like this is a waste time I should watch more YouTube I'm an idiot are you like a I'm not even are you like on a spectrum of some kind probably a little bit I've never gotten tested but it's just like if you want to make great YouTube videos you just watch YouTube so like a two hour movie you can watch like 20 YouTube videos and you get exponentially smarter doing that you know Mark just Wikipedia's movies so he knows what happens and then uses codes from them you know I actually thought about paying someone to like just give me a synopsis of all the biggest movies because like I have never watched Harry Potter or Star Wars or any of it and the amount of times in my life people just you know are like what you've never seen it yeah like it's it used to be funny now it's getting to the point where it's like it's kind of sad so you didn't even watch squid game uh no that I did watch before we filmed it of course and then after watching it were you like wow this is fun yeah we should recreate it but in general we're like whoa like TV shows are cool there's a feeling you can get from a long form series it's really good this is the thing where people misconstrue I don't think movies are bad I just think I want to be the greatest YouTuber to ever live and so like I should just focus on my thing you know I think you've achieved that already uh yeah which is why now I do watch a little bit more let me ask you that about being the greatest YouTube ever what's next because I was listening to your Rogan and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president I know I'll say that'd be fun is that something you've thought about yeah the only thing political aspirations um uh yeah I I would love to I just feel like you have to do a lot of politics leading up to it and I don't know like if you could just go from you know no one ever has done this just being a celebrity to just being president that would be great but if I have to like work my way up and be like a bear I think we've realized you don't have to yeah it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really yeah that'd be bro if I'm telling you if I was if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just give away every penny literally zero dollars for my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing like you're voting for me yeah I like I have 10 billion dollars give away every penny can't be bought because I you know I gave all my money and then I just do what's best for people and I like this yeah and just ignore lobbyists or whatever I like but you need to keep money in order to ignore the lobbyists because otherwise no I give it all away and we're good well there's freedom and I get 400 Grand a year of this President I'm good oh yeah you can live off that 100 and the taxpayers yeah dude I like this I think that I hear you I think if I wanted to like 24 right now yeah so it didn't feel okay yeah it'd be like three more Cycles but I wouldn't do I'd probably do it in my mid-40s yeah yeah I think I could make it interesting enough where I could win okay well how what give away all my money and just like you know I know how to give people's attention I can't say too much because I don't regret it in the future I think yeah I'll just trick all the [ __ ] idiots and before you do that PornHub would you take over that oh my God I would like to do the thumbnails and you know just boost the CTR yeah more saturation yeah you said uh I bought YouTube early on in the interview you said this is what I'm gonna do for the next 10 years of my life you have it's 10 years you're doing YouTube and then what you said a very specific number yeah um well I don't know it just kind of depends how things go like if we have thousands of Beast burgers and feastables go as well when we start mobile game company and other stuff like that I don't know there might just be a world where I run those companies uh yeah it's just let me just see it what do you like what do you like better you like creating or running the companies I love creating and I also it's weird I like both but you like running the companies yeah I do it's a lot of fun it's like being like it's much easier to run a burger joint than to have to like break the internet every week you know I made our to run feastfuls you know I mean because you just get a kick-ass team and you just kind of like Point them in the right direction whereas like this is like I gotta do just crazy [ __ ] that's never thought of and it's a coin flip and you don't even really know of people who care yeah you gotta do that every week and it's all got to be me yeah all sitting around me every week forever yeah um but I enjoy both I think like yeah um like we just opened up our first physical piece Burger which is crushing it um that one's doing like 30 000 a day right now wow and then feastables is in every Walmart now and that's crushing it so it's it's interesting I I'm so impressed by your ability to scale I think that's the toughest thing for a Creator scale like scale your business so like hire a team train that team yes to do those roles so that you can create more time for yourself yeah and I think that's like an unbelievably difficult thing like for me I find it incredibly different I often find like I'm the bottleneck for the things that we're doing 100 and that's not to say that all these guys aren't unbelievably talented and better than me in every single thing that they do yeah but a lot of times it might come down to a decision I have to make and then all of a sudden we're Limited in an output 100 and yeah I'm just like the way you should see it yeah is like you know if hypothetically like for creating content you have like the making the video having the production the editing camera work or whatever writing stuff like even if you split your time evenly you can only put 25 of your time to each whereas like an editor can put 100 of their time into it so like even if they're the same skill level as you they're just gonna [ __ ] on you because they have more time same with the camera guy or writer or whatever and so I think that's where a lot of people just don't realize like they're like well this person isn't as great is me or I can make better decisions yeah but you know 25 is generous so you can probably spend like 10 20 times more time than you can doing it yeah and so due to the sheer extra time they're gonna [ __ ] on you at that job or they [ __ ] on you mean just do it way better just do it better because they have more time yeah yeah like if I had to edit a video you know I just I'd have to put in literally one 100th the amount of time you know what I mean so they should be able to do better tricks should be a better cameraman than me because he could study it 30 000 times more than me now did you find initially I think this was our issue as we were starting to grow we've tried to rectify a bit but like uh that you were hiring people who could do a bunch of things when did you start getting specific in your hires um almost right away that's smart yeah yeah because I feel like what we did is like everybody did a little of everything and then it's hard to [ __ ] scale because we're all doing a little we're trying to pay less salary quite frankly oh really I mean one guy you can hire to do everything no no no I'm not a Chiefs game did you hear me beat Netflix with this special so so you immediately knew you're like okay just need these guys camera these guys editing yeah 100 yeah because you wouldn't hire a guy that box your floors to edit a video obviously yeah yeah we didn't do that we didn't do that we got the guys to edits him off the floor you understand absolutely literally yeah literally yeah yeah no yeah it is crazy thanks like because our main channel is killing it the gaming channel is killing it all it's it's wild part of the process makes you the most like gives you the most dopamine 100 uploading the video seeing like the real time in like the first five hours it gets like five million views it feels so great that's my favorite I always tell them my my favorite part of the day we drop an episode or like we drop a clip I go to the gym right when it drops I'm working out listening to tribal music watch like just refreshing YouTube studio and then you see it hit one and you're like oh what's that drug I imagine that's what it feels like Tesla it's the closest thing it's the closest thing it's so funny exactly that's that's my version yeah he still said Tesla was better because he said that's the closest thing well yeah I mean opposed to like artificially implanting your brains with chemicals yeah the closest the sand is like the the artificial hunt you know what I mean that's what it is yeah seeing the number just go up minute over a minute yeah back in the jungle I'm working out I'm running I'm on the treadmill trying to get the food and all of a sudden the views go up ugh the best best thing ever now is it equally painful if it doesn't do well no at this point are you like unattached to yeah you just look well because why what me getting depressed doesn't do anything you just look at it could should we change the thumbnail change it doesn't work better okay look at the retention graph why did it too bad take some notes move on you know what I mean like being super emotional over it doesn't really do anything it's usually uh which I used to be like if I had a bad video you would know like I'm like I would literally like cry you know especially when like I was betting the farm on every video like that's it you know then it was like [ __ ] like you know I can't pay Tariq if this doesn't do well wait did you ever have a week like that uh yeah but I would just take out a loan and then the next video all right we're gonna spend a little less guys um but now that we're like not as Reckless it's like yeah it's a lot easier to not care as much so you took out a loan to make the next video so yeah you went like uh yeah there was one month where I had to take | less money this month gotta help my divorce they would actually get it they'd be like yeah they probably would he needs it he's probably waiting in line next to them yeah yeah is one of your friends that got divorced here uh no definitely not these 18 year olds no children Tara could have a child bride or something like that no not exactly sure [Laughter] um now you brought your son here bring your kids to work day yeah yeah now is that uncomfortable at all for you about to have my kids here yeah no and bring them back to work this is getting so uncomfortable we just wanted to give Carl a shout out we love Carl we're Big Carl fans here okay so you make millions and millions and millions of dollars who cares right yeah sure I make money because it's so much money you make just tons I don't know what to do with it you don't even know what to do with it no greed okay we don't I don't know okay but that's the fun thing yeah so it's just so much [ __ ] money okay and then you're giving it away constantly yep right and then More's coming in yeah and giving it away it's basically what I did like we I just had this Theory what well hopefully the Ponzi scheme never implodes got you like you know positive schemes are great up until they just go bust | 8 | 6 | 4 | less money this month gotta help my divorce they would actually get it they'd be like yeah they probably would he needs it he's probably waiting in line next to them yeah yeah is one of your friends that got divorced here uh no definitely not these 18 year olds no children Tara could have a child bride or something like that no not exactly sure | um now you brought your son here bring your kids to work day yeah yeah now is that uncomfortable at all for you about to have my kids here yeah no and bring them back to work this is getting so uncomfortable | 3,-3,4 | 2,-2,3 | 3 | -3 | 4 | 2 | -2 | 3 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGrk7Mzm4uo | 13,469 | WGrk7Mzm4uo | 2022-09-27 00:00:00 | I know all about YouTube analytics do you want me to help you with that I could use the help that's you yeah are you logged into the show's channel oh [ __ ] yeah hold on hold on hold on uh oh God that one was uh no the mile highs I was going to Antarctica a billion dollars if we could own the channel and the companies and stuff like that like that sounds enticing but but you've been offered a billion dollars for your YouTube channel with all the companies yeah what's different about the squid game video what did you tap into I I most spent like two million dollars on a video up to that point that one we spent 4.2 million that Sky up there is not real starting at the end of the blue is all CGI yeah all CGI and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president is that something you thought about it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just gave away every penny well there's literally zero dollars in my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing and then I just do what's best for people I like this yeah [Music] we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy good job your parents loved you when you're younger okay you don't no one's an elf did you just call me an elf it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice [Applause] should we fake your death he's trying to tear this whole thing apart like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga um like is there any steaks I said shakes or steaks what's up everybody and welcome to flagrant and today we are joined by Mr b6000 yeah it's funny because I don't have that name anymore wait why don't you have it did you abort it or something oh my God this is a great one uh yes welcome to flagrant I'm here because I had nothing better to do good that's the best reason to be here and uh and we're happy about it and we're just hoping that by the end of this episode I make the same amount of money as I did coming into the episode yeah I mean ideally but I'll just take the same fair enough you know we just don't lose a brand I mean you actually operate at a loss though based on your Rogan so we can do that oh yeah we can do that no problem that's true yeah but that's why if it dips it's a bigger loss you have the most brilliant way of saying that you make lots of money I agree but how no you say I make all this money and then you're like but I spend it all yeah but you still get to say that you make it yeah yeah so no one can really [ __ ] with you when it comes to making the money well I don't spend the money that's to you know for that reason but I guess that is true yeah if it does make it easier when people are like do you make a couple million a month like yeah because I just spend it all so it does make it exactly because if I did it if I was like oh yeah just make a couple million and that was the end then I just seemed like a douchebag exactly yes I do agree but I never really thought about it that way I did thank you you're like Adam Sandler in that way it's not like a multi-millionaire but you're like one of the guys still oh I like them like usually like really rich people you know we want to eat them yeah they buy speedsters and uh yeah and mansions and go on vacations to them all fees twice watches yeah and watches yeah yeah it's a replica right gambling degenerative are you one of the rich people they want to eat are you I'm not that rich not yet you are way more Rich than me uh but I I give my money away I'm poor yeah I give my money to my wife so what's your matter I feel like your fiscal policy is going to completely change once you get yeah yeah yeah yeah just giving away stuff all the time like yeah do more reaction videos from the kitchen yeah that's the reason is there a uh Mrs Beast there is we've only been dating like six months okay my boy how long have you been married don't do that it's media training yeah that was very good uh I've been married since the 18th of December no no December 18th I got married right decision really yes I recommend you do it and you don't need a place because you don't make any money okay did you get one did I get a prenup yeah she got me gonna regret that whatever something happens I know at least like three people who got one and I was friends with them when they got married and then like two of them you know didn't work out and every single one it's just interesting to see it go from like yeah we'll be together forever to like [ __ ] this is the worst decision of my life did you did you think about giving them some money uh because that'd be a great video this money yeah yeah just helping my friend who just got divorced tell you know the people at our food banks like less money this month gotta help my divorce they would actually get it they'd be like yeah they probably would he needs it he's probably waiting in line next to them yeah yeah is one of your friends that got divorced here uh no definitely not these 18 year olds no children Tara could have a child bride or something like that no not exactly sure [Laughter] um now you brought your son here bring your kids to work day yeah yeah now is that uncomfortable at all for you about to have my kids here yeah no and bring them back to work this is getting so uncomfortable we just wanted to give Carl a shout out we love Carl we're Big Carl fans here okay so you make millions and millions and millions of dollars who cares right yeah sure I make money because it's so much money you make just tons I don't know what to do with it you don't even know what to do with it no greed okay we don't I don't know okay but that's the fun thing yeah so it's just so much [ __ ] money okay and then you're giving it away constantly yep right and then More's coming in yeah and giving it away it's basically what I did like we I just had this Theory what well hopefully the Ponzi scheme never implodes got you like you know positive schemes are great up until they just go bust but no I had this idea when I was like 18 I was like when I made a couple thousand dollars a month I was like What if I just give it away and just try to make a little bit more than a couple thousand and then I just was like oh that worked and then I did it again yeah and I've done it every month ever since and I'm just like oh well it just works and it's like a couple Grand turned into 10 turned into 100 turn in a million it just keeps going up and I'm like oh now when when you ever did like the challenges where you're giving away to your guys if they win yeah were you ever worried that you would make them not really want to work that should be stimulus no no uh no especially when we were doing a lot they act different when they make like 150 grams yeah we're doing a lot of them hey they were like 10 grand or 20 grand and this was like Chris just left his job at Best Buy Tariq literally got I tried to hire Teri and he said no and then he went to work at a hospital then a year later he's like I'm depressed and I was like come on over most of them though like were just new and had like no money so like back then when they were fighting those challenges like that was like basically at the time so that's why uh but yeah you do see as time went on they didn't go as long the challenges and that's when obviously we transitioned to people like random people like at the start I wouldn't hook the boys up and then once they were good we're like okay let's start doing we can just start doing other people okay talk about hooking up uh when you're on Rogan you no no no you you brought up the fact that when you posted your first video it was when you got hacked playing uh Pirates battle pirates yeah whatever yeah have you found out who did it no I didn't but I should have they not reached out how would they Mr b6000 is their username right yes what are they gonna tweet me on Twitter like yeah you can do a YouTube video about it I'm Olivia's highest viewed video okay because because the story don't tell the story about like all of five people listening we're gonna [ __ ] the algorithm up already yeah you did [ __ ] your attention you know what um it's fine you know if you don't want this to your views that's up to you so um you're his son you're so true he starts this off with like oh by the way Joe Rogan got 10 million views and you know what goes through my head when he says I was like well it's completely up to the topics you bring up on whether or not we do it no I mean if this gets like a 40 minute retention we're passing that if this is like 25 minutes we're screwed yeah yeah so now we're down there okay so make this story I guess you know it gives a [ __ ] about a guy that hacked me when I was 11 years old on Facebook [ __ ] them our audience is actually uh older than 17. so why don't you go ahead they're insistent okay so when I was 11 I was playing the game a guy just started just destroying me absolutely crushing me every day he had to come through and attack my face and I got pissed so I made a video saying [ __ ] this guy although why there was no words I didn't know how to record audio I was stupid but it was just like him I just sent it to the devs and I uploaded it to YouTube and then it somehow got 20 000 views first video ever gets twenty thousand that's crazy because people who played the game would just watch it but they were trying to figure out how to hack and then like all the comments were like oh so there's a guy out there that's responsible for you posting on YouTube yeah for making pissing me off when I was 11 and then inadvertently making me make a video and he could be listening right now what do you want to say to that guy um thanks for making me Rich he needs a royalty name something I found out who he is would you break him off with a little something yeah of course I give him a couple thousand dollars what do you mean couple thousand that's at least a million right yeah no get him on it dude [ __ ] that guy oh you want to play Pirates now watch this that's a great question when when you're buried alive like do you guys ever think about like him being mean as a boss oh tell them your plan for if you die oh yeah they want me to die oh yeah 100 great video big time they do because the second I died yeah um Carl Chandler Chris the three guys Nolan maybe he's a little newer we haven't decided if he partakes yet or not yeah uh they all put their hand in my Tombstone last take it off gets the channel Everything 100 everything oh what about it dude you just left the brown guy out of this he's not on care he's the camera guy so like most people haven't seen him I mean I don't know what do you think Tariq gets to put his hand on the tombstone yes I think so as of right now it's just written in the like little plan it's just those three we have to update it and put Nolan and maybe Tariq in it yes it's like because we have a little gameplay so you know they can film the video yeah that is happening mark my words I don't even know if I've really said it publicly I tweeted it one time but I'm serious I don't give a [ __ ] how much you guys are cry right put their [ __ ] hands on the tombstone and give the channel to whoever wins okay and don't bully them for it they're just doing what I want and and you guys think you could do without him right like an interesting experiment I'm down should we fake your death dude oh [ __ ] no just like I want to do this the next 10 years and if I do that then like if I fake that did I pick count to 100 000. good point good point you can't take anything okay uh hold on real quick real quick most illegal go for it no uh most illegal video honestly I try to brainstorm legal videos so yeah that's probably a better use of your time okay um what about what about like a competition like I had one for you if I can pitch you hit me okay is that the notepad you're flipping yeah yeah yeah yeah go ahead rip it up three that I for the podcast he's just slide through okay um this is a good tell me if you think this has good one retention and good like uh click through okay I played uh Michael J fox and Jenga that could work um like is there any steaks say again like anything on the line uh I said shakes or steaks I just got Invisalign all right my s's are not gonna come off correctly like maybe if it's like losers car gets hit by a meteor or something that's a good one that's good I like that okay oh okay wait a hundred kids go to an island last one leaves gets an internship with Jeffrey Epstein thoughts right he's dead or is he I haven't seen the body um yeah it's a banger that's right I don't know but yeah for the right reasons but you know get clicks it's probably by the FBI okay you were investigated by the FBI was that well that's what we're wondering oh no I was hunted by them for a video were they really hunting someone else in your crew you want to inform me do you know something I don't I think we know who he's looking at I don't know he's looking at Carl I was looking at Carl I was looking at Carl's dad and nobody else hey hey bro I'm gonna need you to respect Tariq yeah I do okay all right I'm gonna have to walk up yeah yeah you respect to people were spectators one trillion dollars I give you right now uh okay I have to spend it on the video okay what is it uh I bought everything I wanted in life and I just buy everything everything I don't think I get you to a trillion dog I'm gonna be honest now humans are expensive bro like oh I can figure it out people are like you couldn't spend a billion a day if you wanted to [ __ ] 10 super Yachts problem solved I could I could spend a trillion okay I'm just calling up like people who own neighborhoods buying entire neighborhoods you know wow I could figure it out one trillion you buy everything you want in life yeah I would just literally buy like half of America why not have you look into buying a planet uh uh no I mean like they're so far away you know how much cooler it is if planets weren't like 500 000 light years away there's like a realistic way we could visit them in our life yeah I feel like we'd all be way happier yeah yeah we'll just get out of here for a little bit it won't just stress Our Lives it's more fun yeah yeah but it's like you have to like build a ship and send it off and people have to have kids on it and kids and their kids will maybe see that planet it's kind of lame yeah yeah thing I mean that's what your boy's trying to do at least yeah Elon yeah yeah my boy did you believe him when he made that offer what offer if something bad happens to him oh on Twitter I love dude you did your research you think that you're gonna come on this bro my journalistic Integrity oh yeah he thinks he's a journalist but I'm a journalist bro really yeah well then you need to make up some lies that sounds good yeah yeah well first he has to buy it and then yeah I'm very confident if he bought it and died he'd give it to me totally and not the ambassadors that have tens of billions of dollars in it hmm that's a bad enemy to make though I wouldn't have made that deal with you what that oh if I I own Twitter if I die if I die then you get it the guy that is making videos and doing crazy could you imagine someone assassinates him but then like the holy motive I wonder who it could be okay and then they just want to assassinate him yeah they get a [ __ ] YouTube channel but what would you even do with Twitter I mean I don't know sell it's worth a lot of money Give It Away give it give it to a subscribers get some money oh no you stop being poor help him okay because he doesn't need help he he doesn't believe in philanthropy oh no I do believe no no you don't believe in places we've talked about this word on the streets you hate plenty I don't hate it I believe in it um what do you donate to say again we've talked about this a million I donated to Catholic Church I donated sperm for like the first maybe like no it's not three years [Laughter] I believe in philanthropy you've literally never done it I do believe in it he believes in it as an idea he just hasn't gotten around to it no I think I believe when you do it I think you do it yeah yeah wait I believe it you believe him I believe people do it what do you mean I don't know can I believe it and also not do it look I'm saying Jimmy donates millions of dollars every year he plants trees yeah he helps people yes food pantries yeah and you also have a lump of money yeah that you could use to help other people and why don't you um I I feel like you're doing a good job like if everybody what if I have a burger and I have chocolate and I'm giving everybody money and I'm giving everybody Islands you know what I mean your changes how many [ __ ] white oprahs do we need there we go I should give more man yeah agreed why why when did you start giving when I was like 15. oh you started young yeah that's the problem The Habit has been built yeah yeah exactly we're too old to start we got money ladies yeah yeah perfectly logical reason more importantly yeah everyone always talks about obviously you yo yo yo can you stop bullying us no He's a Bully but I love it this guy's a bully dude yeah yeah bro you're a [ __ ] on his side well I'm just saying I didn't realize son of a [ __ ] did you realize he's taller than you two he's the bullet everyone how tall are you wow all right okay your Netflix special that you you know sold on your own and you made more than they would have paid you yeah have you ever was with Netflix but yeah yeah have you ever like said how much money was publicly or anything like that no I haven't do you ever plan on it just every time I hear it I'm always curious like even on the car right over I like was thinking about I was like uh just how much did you [ __ ] on Netflix you know well this guy's good it's not I didn't say it was Netflix Oh wait really yeah I thought that was the whole thing everybody found it was Netflix I never said which one it is he's never revealed that bro I was beyond certain it was Netflix I don't [ __ ] know because he looks at the stock market Netflix is like here's a three million bang yeah delete some jokes and you're like [ __ ] you and then you made like 20 million and you just shat on them I didn't make 20 million yeah obviously that was just the number I put on my head but yeah what's happening yeah if I want bro do you plan on telling us how badly you should on said streaming service I I plan on just taking a moment [ __ ] an [ __ ] dude you just threw out 20 like it was nothing bro I apologize yeah I'm gonna talk [ __ ] man that's it now I'm putting it on YouTube because you said that what the number I'm gonna put the whole special on YouTube there and he's gonna donate his money and I'm gonna donate the money hold on to it hold on to it I'm gonna donate to who you said I'm gonna donate it to me and my wife I'm gonna donate to us and then when you get a divorce you'll get half of it [ __ ] [Laughter] [Laughter] any other [ __ ] questions no but I want that story we were talking about beforehand yeah about the yeah so when he was uh going through video ideas it reminded me of someone who just I can't remember if it was Dubai or somewhere in the Middle East this guy hired a private investigator in North Carolina I have no context to find me um and this is just something that happens yeah someone this happens a lot so whenever people call local private investigators they just let us know because a lot of people just want to know where I am for whatever reason oh the private investigators call you directly yeah it's usually which now I'm giving away my secrets but oh well I'm In Too Deep but yeah um so he calls us lets us know he's like this time it's someone from like Dubai we don't really know what he wants but he's just flying to North Carolina tomorrow and he just paid me to find you and we're like okay cool um and so then the next day he gets there and then with the private I have security somebody's security woman to private investigator to meet him and my Security's just like why the [ __ ] are you here why are you trying to find Jimmy and the guy's like I just have video ideas I really want to give them and my security is like [ __ ] you why are you actually here he's he just kept saying it like 30 times in a row he's just like I just want to give him the sheet of ideas so it's just a piece of paper with video ideas flies across the world private investigator everything instead of like we don't believe you and so they like he let them my security search his hotel room couldn't find anything nothing in there just a suitcase of clothes um and he's just literally just did all that to give me a list of ideas and then and then well my security was like oh Jimmy's out of town for three months did you ever get the [ __ ] yeah well then just get took it I was like I'll give it to Jimmy and then he gave it to me and it was just like it was like open up a free gas station like open that's actually that's a very Middle Eastern idea yeah he's trying to make money off you it was like 30 ideas like that and I was just like this is actually a lot of women read in public or something like that we we did get squid game out of that [ __ ] yeah [ __ ] I sold a guy from Dubai's idea this is before the real squid game that's the game yeah no he wrote it all out yeah this guy just hired private investigators flew down there all this muddy camped out just to give me a list of video ideas and none of them were good none of them were good I got I got plenty of ideas yeah yeah I need ideas give me the Dubai ideas it's much easier to fly here at the North Carolina do you have a lot of people uh doing that like uh just okay you hear the stories of people going like I risk everything to be here like I saw Carl's story of like I spent my last dollar and then I ended up working out and that kind of inspires every lunatic to take their last dollar yeah to just show up I just I live in my studio now yeah so it's like fin stand and stuff that's and most people know that so they don't but sometimes you know the gym in the bedroom but sometimes I'll go out and they'll just be like yeah this guy's just been camping behind a gas station for like a month waiting to see you and I'm like lovely and how do you say I just like tell him I'm just not interested like that's not how you know I like to meet people but that's still like occasionally happens and it's always like that never pissed them off because you're not like I mean that's not the nicest I'm not I don't think anyone expects me to just go and be people who just can't battle wait for my attention because you don't know like they might be trying to kill me they might be whatever yeah so it used to be it's weird I like hostiles sometimes it's like a lot and then sometimes it's not as much yeah have you ever had a dangerous moment like with your security where they had to intervene and like get someone off you um dangerous car can you think of one uh not really no nobody cares enough yeah you know Baxter's ever a crowd of five people is it ever women waiting to see okay Mr Beast no I usually um no but we've never had any like crazy issues it's actually kind of weird like with the mall one like that went really well even though like crazy yeah at one point there's like 20 000 people in there yeah and girls showing tits and [ __ ] these are jokes these are videos these are children really they're screenshots in the video of like of girls like flashing I hope not yeah no that was nuts it was crazy yeah and they had like the the American flag like pasties or whatever like that this is not true you didn't see this it's on it's there was a whole quibby series that they made about is that what it was nope turn the phone when within five seconds of using quibby I want to watch the show and I was like this is garbage I went to screenshot and the screenshot was black yeah and that's how I knew it would fail because you can't make memes they made it where you couldn't take screenshots of anything Netflix's problem too yeah well at least Netflix like you can watch it on your computer and it's easier to screenshot yeah clivia was phone only and there's zero way to take a screenshot okay so it's like how the [ __ ] do you expect these shows to go viral yeah like that was the same time of baby Yoda and all this stuff and then quibby's just like no no memes yeah and it's like no one's ripping your [ __ ] shows can you explain that a little bit more about how like memes Drive the culture of 100 yeah like the Mandalorian you get rid of baby Yoda memes it's like nobody even talks about it exactly I I never would watch it now when you're creating videos here you also going like what do you think will be memeable in this uh I probably should but no but no yeah right now I'm just film and TV like film TV it's what is memeable no not only it's just it's just something that happens naturally if you're just kidding or no one can take screenshots and you're just an idiot you know I mean because that's how you just get attention on Twitter it's like cutting one of your legs out for money yeah if you try to make a meme then your cringe like memes just happen yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you mean like if you're the creator of the TV show like The House of dragons is going this is the memeable moment exactly you I don't think you can ever do that you can't force them you can embrace it though after it's like organically possible lean in yeah yeah I think you have to yeah that like what is that movie morbius or whatever yeah movie that got absolutely destroyed yeah did you see there but it still did well right I don't know I'm pretty sure like the destroying it caused it to they put it back out in theaters oh really it went viral as like a meme and they're like we're re-releasing it opinion says well with the like people actually I was enjoyed though yeah you did that you did yeah we did we bought every ticket in a theater and then we just flooded with people in suits oh it's amazing it's great and I heard they made that [ __ ] illegal yeah like they did a few places yeah it's like for the first seven three years I go to a movie theater and then like three days later it's like no you can't do that also like uh the most mature way to dress yeah right yeah it has a very cultish feel to it though just a bunch of young white kids in suits and whatever yo yeah this is scary you're saying if there's like a bunch of white people all dressed the same you would like to make you feel uncomfortable a little bit I wonder if I walked in and it was just a hundred black people in suits how I would feel yeah Men In Black because I think the New Mexico Studios what's going on yeah that is wild I don't know why that is concerning it shouldn't be illegal but it does make you literally because some of them started lighting firecrackers in the movie theater and one of them like blew up a couple seats I told you man it's a dangerous thing you can't trust that many white people just the same why we get out of it we get out of hand you get yeah you get one group thinking it's just a it's just a mob also yeah yeah but it is fun see me and then we break it up so it's not too much white boy [ __ ] going on yeah yeah so every time Mark and I are starting to get hyped about things yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not good that's actually a really good idea that's why fatic is a part of the team so that's it gotcha too much fun he's not good we keep his camera off he's like Sid Vicious we don't even use it yeah you're content made it but just in case you guys start going you want to go to Charlottesville he's like everybody chill out this is very important that's how you build your team oh that's smart Teresa Foundation right yes okay this is good are they allowed to have girlfriends is the team allowed to have girlfriends I wish not but you know if they want to are they just drowning in strange or what oh my gosh let's cut over time boy [Laughter] dude okay girl I didn't know you had it like that my voice [Music] [Laughter] Nola's got a little something going on I know 100 right chain out by the way yeah oh I love it some wild [ __ ] boys you got over here oh [ __ ] crazy again what are you guys do on a Saturday like split a six-pack of white claws dude all right well I don't I just work all the time yeah yeah so I usually see them when we're filming but outside that I don't see them too much anymore okay how do you split the work balance with your girl you've introduced this relationship in last time yeah that's what US married guys want to know yeah I got you guys the answers you've been needing she's actually from South Africa so she can only come here 90 days a year anyways so it just naturally Works itself out [Music] African-American uh I'm working on it a white woman and African-American oh there's your video wedding episode it is a little weird that like like she makes good money she's like gone to college multiple degrees everything you would want you would want her here yeah but I still feel like there's just literally no way to get her in America like you why don't we like reform our immigration process we're like yeah we should let in the good ones right who said that why are you making it bad why are you making it bad you're twisting I don't want my girlfriend you've been doing this to him for an hour okay um but you can marry her and then she's in yeah I'll just marry her yeah that seems like a reasonable way you could actually have Nolan do it no one could marry your guy it would be a great video is that like a company could I just pay someone to marry her yeah yeah really is that like it's not a company but no one can do it are you thinking about I don't know what like if she has to marry someone I see on it you know this is a little bit but if it doesn't do anything but it feels just like some guy that I'll never see again and they just like marry so she can move here like but he might try something no no one's an elf look at that like he's not gonna do anything yeah but the problem is no one will make fun of me but the thing is because there's a lot of the Rings call me an elf yeah [Music] it means if we gave you a bow and arrow you'd be nice it's a compliment cookies in a tree that's what he's saying no Lord of the Rings bro I've seen Lord of the Rings I just don't know what I look like you know the people that you're like my family no no not your ears your [ __ ] head and your skin and your yes your beauty [Laughter] married to my girlfriend maybe he's not doing nothing yeah but he's got that over himself no he doesn't win a single argument anymore that's it why what happened because I'm married to your girlfriend but then you can also look at that do you know who that is Legolas yes yeah yeah yeah [Laughter] wait what else do we got in here yeah yeah yeah I was surprised you're not grabbing your phone back wait you're gonna let him look him look at your photos yeah yeah yeah it can't happen no yeah okay you you guys should trade phones that'd be fun oh me and you yeah do you want to do that ah I feel like he's just gonna like go through my YouTube analytics and start blurting out numbers well I maybe that's actually a great idea actually probably he wasn't good do you want me to help you with that I I could use the help that'd be great I mean we could work on some TMS are you the behind the scenes guy no it's all it's awesome [Laughter] yeah are you logged into the show's channel yeah what are we doing right now wait hold on hold on hold on what are we doing here we're checking out bro you got 2.3 look at you this guy's crazy bro no you're killing it crazy guys he's a good job I keep up the good work you know what I will not compliment you the rest yeah he's gonna give you advice and then you're gonna give him your parents loved you and you're younger you don't know someone abused this man and he just doesn't know how to take us off I'm proud of you for having two million subscribers wow and he's like what the [ __ ] did you just say I was like I'm proud wow okay Solomon over here bro yeah you could tell the accuracy by how fast we both did Jesus Christ my Dad loved me at least you know hey Mom still stepped it up a little bit so it's RPM's a little how do we get that up yeah yeah what'd he say RPM RPMs yeah I've been working on those yeah yeah you definitely I love the RPM so you swear a lot in the video say again you swear a lot in the videos I I wouldn't no you did I could tell you dude just look at the revenue I don't swear you have to I don't swear it wouldn't be this love you didn't swear racist a lot but that's not cussing gotcha do you know what I mean yeah a substitute like you know oh you're saying say things that are wrong yeah you say things that you know advertisers naughty yes but we have great advertisers the numbers it's just funny that like I could never looking for a chocolate bar sponsorship actually can we sponsor the next one yeah how do you charge an episode for you yeah free oh philanthropy thank you yeah you almost said Felicia it's only one other time okay palette of chocolate right there matter of fact we need to replace the trees we will replace it with a paddle of chocolate matter of fact matter of fact I've been wanting to try your burger let's see how fast are the Beast Burgers usually come go Mark uh uh probably 30 minutes 30 minutes well we might get them a little quicker uh what are they here is it only hamburgers or do you have anything for people who aren't going uh yeah he doesn't eat beef we have a grilled cheese oh that sounds fun I'm working on oh no we have impossible meat as well okay I forgot we launched that it's just like three percent of our sales like no one gives a [ __ ] I was like really expecting people to [ __ ] with the plant-based first we were friends you know what I mean I thought we had a thing and we just [ __ ] on him together no what this that's nothing it's just in general America just doesn't give a [ __ ] thank you yeah because I was like really hoping that would like explode and like no one cared about the impossible me yeah and we also did like lettuce wraps where you can substitute the bun for a letter that sounds great like that yeah that sounds fun when people want a burger they want a burger that's what I found out the hardware what's up guys today's episode is sponsored by surf shark surf shark is a modern VPN design with the user in mind their utilities are powered by a robust security mechanism but designed to be simple intuitive to use enjoy all the freedoms of an open internet safely and 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back to the show look at this how long have these been sitting around hold on one second because if they say these are bad it's not my fault no we got some real Beast Burgers okay this is it Mr Beast that old ass packaging oh oh God here we go wait a minute okay this is weird that looks awful like a Big Mac s Special Sauce it looks like a Big Mac dude I mean when you order we order from McDonald's cheese lettuce onions oh what is this it looked like two old beef patties mustard sauce pickles cheese lettuce I just thought it says hasn't been opened yeah so this is a Big Mac then you guys really move it off how are you going to use my card and not get an impossible Burger you can eat beef why not oh I mean it's impossible this is a beast Burger this is what happens when you hang out with comedian yes okay so these do look like Big Mac so that is a big mac oh that is yeah oh so that's what the Beast burger no you can't help your [ __ ] you but no don't know what's going on let me see this he uses ghost kitchens right oh this one though that looks more like her that's what hold on let me okay that's it hold on hold on hold on dude do you have like a do you have like a team that we could call like an HR son that's crazy because we didn't do that you did no we did not swear there's not a coincidence that the ones without the stickers are Big Macs and the ones with the stickers not opened aren't [Laughter] yeah it looks like it's been centered around a little bit but it looks good I'm gonna take a bite right now it's not my fault if it's been sitting out for an hour is there money in there oh no I'm not gonna lie I have fire it's got fries on it um that's bar hey that's Chandler so whoever's on our marketing team make an ad of him saying that and just run it all over that's fine just Target everyone within 100 mile radius of this or anyone that goes to a show just hit him with Instagram ads if I'm going that's far I think that's [ __ ] fire right there what do you rate that one out of ten burger burger review honestly down down honestly no not honestly guys while you're ready I'm honest with you right now this needs a little more sauce okay probably because it's been sitting around a little bit it's dried up oh yeah you this this the version they ordered is the one with no sauce well you don't need to throw it like that that's the old factory they need to update it they need to update that [ __ ] yeah agree [ __ ] that package agreed what's wrong with Angry Birds Packaging Patty yeah excellent I agree Patty is excellent dare I say the best you've ever had for fast food okay dude I'm an in and out Enthusiast I feel the return retention you know just give us the rating so we can love it holy [ __ ] that's reduction step it up bro miles the single please one out of ten all right you know what I'll take it if it saves the podcast it's just hardwired you can't spend a decade of your life studying how to go violent how to get people to watch the video and then have it fire bomb in front of your eyes to not like hurt your soul yeah so you think about that with everything yeah it'd be like the same as if I started doing stand up there and it was just god-awful you would be like I gotta like what about during sex do you ever be like oh my God I'm starting to look around the room a little bit like Africa would be nice to be back right now it's been more than three minutes I think we got enough RPMs so is there a collab burger or food product that we the flagrant Beast products yeah I know [Music] [Laughter] [Laughter] so Jimmy gave you some advice on your channel we'll suck less yeah um what is uh what's your advice for his channel oh number one uh plane crash video very close to 911. I intentionally made sure we did not upload in September they were like you know we might need more time I was like you don't have more time [Applause] I was like this is like we're a couple days away from September like that's so funny it's like no one gives you advice on your channel so this is gonna be a perfect tons of advice every time I upload I get like 40 phone calls from people tell me how it could be about it is there somebody you watch that you still learn a lot from on YouTube that you're like oh that guy I could learn from uh I mean everyone like even like anybody more than anyone else anybody no it changes it's just like I just like watching random Youtube videos and like even like a homeless person on the street you can learn something from like how to be more humble or what what it's like for someone who's struggling so like if you apply that same mindset to videos like every video you watch there's something you can learn especially if it has a million views like there's a reason it got a million views okay I could give you the dumb dick joke answer Alex didn't believe that you got buried oh you didn't no interesting he had a whole reason for why you didn't get buried I kind of forgot you don't just forget yourself this is the most viewed video You're questioning my existence yeah exactly I'm just saying the camera angles made it seem as though oh I could have fixed it I remember this whoa I know and I think you're you're worth too much to take that risk uh yeah my mom was like crying when I filmed this video I was like Mom I promise we did the math um let me skip to over here to show you there's a scene where the boys literally dig down and yeah see that penis sign yeah they literally dug down and put that there yeah uh so you you could have planned wait wait right here oh Carl wait wait for the cut right here look you can literally see where they put the sign there and how deep it is underground or that could have just been shot at a different time where whoa Carl is on to us what if like to Arena like Brandon here it was like hey Jimmy I need you really uncomfortable yeah okay with this video specifically okay yeah um well there's two I'm curious about for the same reason this the one where you're in the the outdoor pool and you're under underwater yeah the thing bro that was done like five years ago this yeah the headache yeah have you figured out what that was about yeah it's because uh I was an idiot back then in the like we were pumping air in but the CO2 or whatever the [ __ ] you it doesn't get pumped out yeah getting pumped out yeah so you're just inhaling your own carbon yeah and so then when I started getting a headache I was like oh [ __ ] and then dioxide yeah yeah carbon dioxide so then we like called someone who know what they're doing they're like yeah you're an idiot yeah yeah okay and I just got out immediately okay and then when you're buried under this is what we learned from it so we had a pump that was pumping in air and pumping out the old Air what was the most catastrophic thought you had while you were completely buried I uh tried there was a camera at my feet three could also talk about this too uh and I went to like go adjust it and I couldn't so I like literally turned around and I'm you know not super flexible so I literally like was going to turn and so like I'm laying like this and as I'm like Disney I got caught like halfway and I was like [ __ ] I'm [ __ ] I'm fine I was literally like guys if I can't get out of this in two seconds you start digging right the [ __ ] now because I was like cotton is super awkward position like in the thing and I just like I'm gonna give it one last try and I just pushed as hard as I could and I popped out the other end and then I adjusted the camera and then you had to get back exactly because have my because it's like the thing got Slimmer this way yeah it was so uncomfortable on that side yeah so then I had to do it again and I almost got stuck again like what was going through your head when you were watching it Mike this was the first time he like panicked during the whole situation yeah we got really scared no did you calculate how much time it would take to excavate yeah they knew that because uh I mean it was like they could get me out in under five minutes if I really needed to be I okay I started practicing with my hand on the tombstone [Laughter] I see you this feels good it feels real good yeah so any of these other ones up here you think are fake no I just thought that one I think you counting to 100. he set his sights on you he's about to start [ __ ] on you well he's like I think your [ __ ] shoes are fake or fake easy so subreddits would go crazy exposing me and I just didn't care and I thought it was the funniest thing ever that's so smart and then I wore a fake Supreme shirt in a video same thing Reddit just lost their mind and I just I just love doing it to piss him off I mean it also keeps you in the conversation even more though no it's just funny to like watch them analyze the box logo and why it's not real you also save money you don't have to buy that's true yeah I'm still terrified about this buried alive dude I'm I'm severely claustrophobic wow oh yeah severely close so the nights before I slept in a coffin in my garage to like oh you get used here yeah emo phase too so you put a little effort in so there's just this coffin in my cold ass garage and I just lay in it close it chill there for a couple hours do you like consult with people about this first that one David Blaine yeah interesting because he did a week so I was gonna do 24 hours Bear live and then I called David and I was like I'm gonna bury myself for 24 hours and he's like that's it and I said all right I'm doing it for 50 hours and that's why it's 50 hours instead of 24. yeah but did you see his dumbass balloon thing who is he to judge I mean that's pretty cool whatever the balloon oh he just flew in a balloon it was like upper he held on to balloons flew up and then popped him came down yeah it was pretty cool but yeah that's so I I had to double it because he just basically Shadow my entire existence I mean we would have been fine if you did 24 hours just the Buried Alive thing like what is the the oxygen tank malfunctioned I couldn't handle being stuck in an elevator for 24 seconds there's enough oxygen in there for five minutes yeah I guess you're right we had so we buried that cop in like five separate times we had you know David Blaine Consulting a bunch of other people Consulting I was probably safer under there than I was above ground I think that's what they told me yeah yeah I don't know if that's true the dirt on the glass and you realize it's like this much glass between you and just thousands of pounds of dirt then it's like well [ __ ] oh that's right if it eats a little bit of a crack did you hear any weird sounds so terrified I'm sure I heard tons of stuff oh but we tried to keep it upbeat and not like I was super scared so like in the video I don't think we really put that kind of stuff did that help you get less scared knowing so many people are watching if you get scared it's kind of embarrassing whatever so that kind of blocks out that no that whole time I was just like for the love of God don't crack like because all I did was stare up at that dirt and so I just saw six thousand ten thousand whatever thousand pounds of dirt the whole time for like 50 hours straight and it hurts like [ __ ] like the bottom is just wood so you're just like that in of itself is a gem like you're just like laying on wood it was it wasn't fun but you know 194 million views not that bad I would do it again yeah what was the worst one to do the one you would never do again um that's a great way let me flip through these no buried alive I do again a heartbeat that wasn't like in the grand scheme of things it wasn't too crazy uh 50 hours in solitary you can find me don't seem that bad no well after you're married that seems like a kind of a vacation yeah now you have the [ __ ] Goofy Goobers over here torturing you and they won't let me sleep or do anything uh okay no Carl what's the hard one there's what I I say all the time but I'm just drawing blank well it's not counted before I was nice maybe yes I spent 25 hours a night that was miserable I you couldn't pay me to do that anymore what do you mean we just built a house that ice and I just spent 24 hours in it were you wearing something they would like pants like this and like a short sleeve shirt it was brutal I was like shivering all night it was one of those ones like 10 hours in I was like I'm too invested to quit but currently wouldn't do it that was like Peak grind me where I was like you know I'll do things as long as you know I'm not putting my life in danger like which we had man that's the widest thing you've done really love not being cold it's like a thing I've noticed is why people walk around yeah yeah let's go yeah that that's your whitest sitting in ice for 24 hours yeah yeah that was fruit how many views did they get uh like 100 million it kind of flopped I'm just kidding what is a flop for you now um if a video doesn't get like 50 million views it kind of sucks so but that's in English and then we dub them in other languages I love this yeah have you seen the Espanol Channel yeah yeah you should do that we yeah yeah so that one's been crushing we just hit 20 million you know what's weird is I bet people already were doing that for your videos yeah they were especially in like Japan for some reason yeah people used to upload their videos like crazy and they get millions of views yeah yeah so then that's why we just started doing it but the way that you guys do it is smart where you get the actors that are known the exactly well there's a huge secondary market for Mr Beast videos so like we'd come up with an original idea whatever like I don't know press this button 100 Grand and then the next day you'd see people on Spanish-speaking communities Japan Russia all over the world do the exact same video so part of this as well like everyone would just rip off our videos around the world because that was like a huge strategy like people at all these countries or just see who can copy our English videos first in their country and now that we do this like the rate of that has decreased a lot wow I wonder fake Supreme t-shirt exactly yeah exactly if people do that with our stand-up oh 100 they do There's a comic I'll leave his name out but um it was like huge in France and apparently he was just using Seinfeld's material I'm talking about oh but I'll tell you after I think he was just like using Seinfeld's material and then they became friends really yeah because Seinfeld is such a [ __ ] Maniac he was like this guy's got great taste like if he's gonna if he's gonna steal something he steals from the best and then they became buddies but he was like a huge comic there how crazy is that I've never heard Seinfeld I love Utah no no no I love you dude yeah that's the best thing you've said on this whole podcast do you know who he is even well I know because you got Tariq talks about comedians all the time yeah but but you but whatever right no he's a non-factor right like explain like to me like like a non I'm pretty he's in um he has a show that's that's on no no but no no he does I know you're [ __ ] with me you don't know how much you hate Seinfeld yeah yeah yeah I don't hate him but I just think he's whatever but the fact that the fact that you don't even know keep going about this like talk me through this like what are you feeling about emotionally retention through the roof right now this is going okay guys just like Drake talks about him and that's about it but he has a show or like what is this thing like isn't it I think I'm gonna sound dumb isn't it like Better Call Saul or something like that or no yes yes what is wait the show is Seinfeld yeah okay gotcha but that's okay his show is actually called Breaking Bad yeah yeah yeah yeah but go on go on go on but yeah okay yeah no Andrew I need you to ask him about movies he's never seen an entire movie in his one movie in his entire life I grew up on YouTube this guy's never seen movies yeah it was because he was homeschooled this was different with you right uh yeah no I just thought it was waste did you have chickenpox as a kid oh my gosh probably you just had shingles like a couple months ago so that means shingles means you've had chickenpox oh yeah it's the same virus though yeah yeah so there you go yes Mark just had chickenpox at the ripe age of 25 years old who are you to talk what are you talking about a compromised immune system I know same same way oh really no it's Crohn's oh you got Crohn's yeah can you eat your Burgers uh yeah those are fine it's mostly just I don't know I'm just so heavily medicated it's like in remission right now but if I wasn't on medicine it would be different oh what type of meds uh Remicade not that anyone knows what that is you ever do a Remicade at a party one time no but if you ever tried a Tesla ecstasy pill because that's [ __ ] amazing are you public about doing drugs dude love them literally I was like yeah I'm on my way over he's like is it like an X that's what is it ecstasy Etsy that's where people make [ __ ] you drugs yeah I'm a Christian boy I don't do drugs he's like okay okay I didn't know if you were [ __ ] with me or not because like you'd also like he's going back and forth with like being very sarcastic and then like very serious in the text so I have no [ __ ] we've never spoken on the phone before at all and like so we're on the phone we're on the group text with Tariq and he's like listen we need to kick Tariq out of the room immediately after he comes here I go okay that's fine and then he messaged me on the side he goes I would like to talk to you privately but the joke was that Tariq just loves you guys and so I was all that stupid [ __ ] I was saying and there was to embarrass him because he is he cringing in the back of the car and I remember so I just say some dumb [ __ ] to you like yeah I don't [ __ ] care or whatever and then I just looked back and he's just like hey hey you're a good guy dude Tark you're a good guy hey thank you and we're gonna pronounce your name right every single time yeah okay appreciate it guys appreciate it 100 you are a good Christian boy though is it true that your old YouTube Banner used to be like a Bible verse it did I used to go to a Christian School back in the day oh yeah but now it's like it's just kind of hard to tell what's right or what's wrong like religion wise there's so many and I don't know I believe there is some kind of God but how do you know damn Mark just got so sorry right [Laughter] because he's such a [ __ ] Catholic oh is that why you donate to the Catholic Church yeah yeah he bullish you no he calls that my paycheck that's what it is yeah yeah he gives me money hey I have his Revenue up here I mean he could probably make some more donations I think so donations right but for so so have your feelings changed since tark's been around or like has he are you expanding the caliph oh my gosh Jesus it is admirable to see how devoted he is though yeah like he doesn't he doesn't drink he doesn't do anything he he's actually he's not one of those people that just preach it he actually follows it sometimes it does make me go like damn like there's something there like he really cares a lot you know it's easier we're busy guys okay five times a day he gets his five minutes I'm just saying this guy Titanic have you seen it no I haven't seen it at all was it that before I was born before I was 18 I didn't even listen to music because I was like this is a waste time I should watch more YouTube I'm an idiot are you like a I'm not even are you like on a spectrum of some kind probably a little bit I've never gotten tested but it's just like if you want to make great YouTube videos you just watch YouTube so like a two hour movie you can watch like 20 YouTube videos and you get exponentially smarter doing that you know Mark just Wikipedia's movies so he knows what happens and then uses codes from them you know I actually thought about paying someone to like just give me a synopsis of all the biggest movies because like I have never watched Harry Potter or Star Wars or any of it and the amount of times in my life people just you know are like what you've never seen it yeah like it's it used to be funny now it's getting to the point where it's like it's kind of sad so you didn't even watch squid game uh no that I did watch before we filmed it of course and then after watching it were you like wow this is fun yeah we should recreate it but in general we're like whoa like TV shows are cool there's a feeling you can get from a long form series it's really good this is the thing where people misconstrue I don't think movies are bad I just think I want to be the greatest YouTuber to ever live and so like I should just focus on my thing you know I think you've achieved that already uh yeah which is why now I do watch a little bit more let me ask you that about being the greatest YouTube ever what's next because I was listening to your Rogan and I swear to God I thought this guy should be president I know I'll say that'd be fun is that something you've thought about yeah the only thing political aspirations um uh yeah I I would love to I just feel like you have to do a lot of politics leading up to it and I don't know like if you could just go from you know no one ever has done this just being a celebrity to just being president that would be great but if I have to like work my way up and be like a bear I think we've realized you don't have to yeah it is appealing yeah when I'm like 40 or 50. really yeah that'd be bro if I'm telling you if I was if I was a billionaire and I just gave away all my money I was like I can't be bought I just give away every penny literally zero dollars for my bank account vote for me I feel like that's a pretty good campaign thing like you're voting for me yeah I like I have 10 billion dollars give away every penny can't be bought because I you know I gave all my money and then I just do what's best for people and I like this yeah and just ignore lobbyists or whatever I like but you need to keep money in order to ignore the lobbyists because otherwise no I give it all away and we're good well there's freedom and I get 400 Grand a year of this President I'm good oh yeah you can live off that 100 and the taxpayers yeah dude I like this I think that I hear you I think if I wanted to like 24 right now yeah so it didn't feel okay yeah it'd be like three more Cycles but I wouldn't do I'd probably do it in my mid-40s yeah yeah I think I could make it interesting enough where I could win okay well how what give away all my money and just like you know I know how to give people's attention I can't say too much because I don't regret it in the future I think yeah I'll just trick all the [ __ ] idiots and before you do that PornHub would you take over that oh my God I would like to do the thumbnails and you know just boost the CTR yeah more saturation yeah you said uh I bought YouTube early on in the interview you said this is what I'm gonna do for the next 10 years of my life you have it's 10 years you're doing YouTube and then what you said a very specific number yeah um well I don't know it just kind of depends how things go like if we have thousands of Beast burgers and feastables go as well when we start mobile game company and other stuff like that I don't know there might just be a world where I run those companies uh yeah it's just let me just see it what do you like what do you like better you like creating or running the companies I love creating and I also it's weird I like both but you like running the companies yeah I do it's a lot of fun it's like being like it's much easier to run a burger joint than to have to like break the internet every week you know I made our to run feastfuls you know I mean because you just get a kick-ass team and you just kind of like Point them in the right direction whereas like this is like I gotta do just crazy [ __ ] that's never thought of and it's a coin flip and you don't even really know of people who care yeah you gotta do that every week and it's all got to be me yeah all sitting around me every week forever yeah um but I enjoy both I think like yeah um like we just opened up our first physical piece Burger which is crushing it um that one's doing like 30 000 a day right now wow and then feastables is in every Walmart now and that's crushing it so it's it's interesting I I'm so impressed by your ability to scale I think that's the toughest thing for a Creator scale like scale your business so like hire a team train that team yes to do those roles so that you can create more time for yourself yeah and I think that's like an unbelievably difficult thing like for me I find it incredibly different I often find like I'm the bottleneck for the things that we're doing 100 and that's not to say that all these guys aren't unbelievably talented and better than me in every single thing that they do yeah but a lot of times it might come down to a decision I have to make and then all of a sudden we're Limited in an output 100 and yeah I'm just like the way you should see it yeah is like you know if hypothetically like for creating content you have like the making the video having the production the editing camera work or whatever writing stuff like even if you split your time evenly you can only put 25 of your time to each whereas like an editor can put 100 of their time into it so like even if they're the same skill level as you they're just gonna [ __ ] on you because they have more time same with the camera guy or writer or whatever and so I think that's where a lot of people just don't realize like they're like well this person isn't as great is me or I can make better decisions yeah but you know 25 is generous so you can probably spend like 10 20 times more time than you can doing it yeah and so due to the sheer extra time they're gonna [ __ ] on you at that job or they [ __ ] on you mean just do it way better just do it better because they have more time yeah yeah like if I had to edit a video you know I just I'd have to put in literally one 100th the amount of time you know what I mean so they should be able to do better tricks should be a better cameraman than me because he could study it 30 000 times more than me now did you find initially I think this was our issue as we were starting to grow we've tried to rectify a bit but like uh that you were hiring people who could do a bunch of things when did you start getting specific in your hires um almost right away that's smart yeah yeah because I feel like what we did is like everybody did a little of everything and then it's hard to [ __ ] scale because we're all doing a little we're trying to pay less salary quite frankly oh really I mean one guy you can hire to do everything no no no I'm not a Chiefs game did you hear me beat Netflix with this special so so you immediately knew you're like okay just need these guys camera these guys editing yeah 100 yeah because you wouldn't hire a guy that box your floors to edit a video obviously yeah yeah we didn't do that we didn't do that we got the guys to edits him off the floor you understand absolutely literally yeah literally yeah yeah no yeah it is crazy thanks like because our main channel is killing it the gaming channel is killing it all it's it's wild part of the process makes you the most like gives you the most dopamine 100 uploading the video seeing like the real time in like the first five hours it gets like five million views it feels so great that's my favorite I always tell them my my favorite part of the day we drop an episode or like we drop a clip I go to the gym right when it drops I'm working out listening to tribal music watch like just refreshing YouTube studio and then you see it hit one and you're like oh what's that drug I imagine that's what it feels like Tesla it's the closest thing it's the closest thing it's so funny exactly that's that's my version yeah he still said Tesla was better because he said that's the closest thing well yeah I mean opposed to like artificially implanting your brains with chemicals yeah the closest the sand is like the the artificial hunt you know what I mean that's what it is yeah seeing the number just go up minute over a minute yeah back in the jungle I'm working out I'm running I'm on the treadmill trying to get the food and all of a sudden the views go up ugh the best best thing ever now is it equally painful if it doesn't do well no at this point are you like unattached to yeah you just look well because why what me getting depressed doesn't do anything you just look at it could should we change the thumbnail change it doesn't work better okay look at the retention graph why did it too bad take some notes move on you know what I mean like being super emotional over it doesn't really do anything it's usually uh which I used to be like if I had a bad video you would know like I'm like I would literally like cry you know especially when like I was betting the farm on every video like that's it you know then it was like [ __ ] like you know I can't pay Tariq if this doesn't do well wait did you ever have a week like that uh yeah but I would just take out a loan and then the next video all right we're gonna spend a little less guys um but now that we're like not as Reckless it's like yeah it's a lot easier to not care as much so you took out a loan to make the next video so yeah you went like uh yeah there was one month where I had to take | but no I had this idea when I was like 18 I was like when I made a couple thousand dollars a month I was like What if I just give it away and just try to make a little bit more than a couple thousand and then I just was like oh that worked and then I did it again yeah and I've done it every month ever since and I'm just like oh well it just works and it's like a couple Grand turned into 10 turned into 100 turn in a million it just keeps going up and I'm like oh now when when you ever did like the challenges where you're giving away to your guys if they win yeah were you ever worried that you would make them not really want to work that should be stimulus no no uh no especially when we were doing a lot they act different when they make like 150 grams yeah we're doing a lot of them hey they were like 10 grand or 20 grand and this was like Chris just left his job at Best Buy Tariq literally got I tried to hire Teri and he said no and then he went to work at a hospital then a year later he's like I'm depressed and I was like come on over most of them though like were just new and had like no money so like back then when they were fighting those challenges like | 8 | 6 | 4 | but no I had this idea when I was like 18 I was like when I made a couple thousand dollars a month I was like What if I just give it away and just try to make a little bit more than a couple thousand and then I just was like oh that worked and then I did it again yeah and I've done it every month ever since and I'm just like oh well it just works and it's like a couple Grand turned into 10 turned into 100 turn in a million it just keeps going up and I'm like oh now | were you ever worried that you would make them not really want to work that should be stimulus | 8,6,8 | 2,-3,3 | 8 | 6 | 8 | 2 | -3 | 3 |
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