436: Lean Into The Pain. it Will Make You Better. With Andrew Huberman

Jocko Willink

This is Jocko, podcast number 436, with Echo, Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. He no longer cared at all. Exhaustion, hunger, thirst, dirt, the fatigue of perpetual fear, weakness from lack of water, bruises, danger had all taken their toll of him, until somewhere within the last few minutes, he had ceased to feel human.

So much of so many different emotions had been drained from him that his emotional reservoir was empty. He just no longer cared much about anything.

This great evil, where does it come from? How did it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from?

Who's doing this? Who's killing us? Robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might have known?

Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow? The sun to shine?

Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?

And those are two passages right there. One from the book the thin red line, and another from the movie the thin red line. The book is written by James Jones, who fought in the bloody battle of Guadalcanal. It's where John Bazalon fought, also where Mitchell Page fought. We just covered a book about that podcast.

435 the movie was written and directed by Terrence Malik or Malick, and both the book and the movie explorer as much about who we are as people, who we are as human beings, as they do about war. And the guests I have with us tonight will help us and discuss with us who we are as human beings, how we become ourselves, what choices we have, and what we can do to steer who we are and what we become. From a philosophical perspective, from a physiological perspective, from a psychological perspective, and yes, from a neurological perspective, this would be none other than Doctor Andrew Huberman, back again. Last on this podcast, 332. He's back again.

Andrew, thanks for joining us. Great to be here. Thanks for having me, guys. This great evil, where does it come from? It's the last time I was on your podcast, or when I was on your podcast, you were asking me questions about identity, my identity.

And it was weird because I listened to it afterwards, and I kind of realized that I missed out on sort of the root question that you were trying to get at. I gave you some pretty, just nonchalant answers when you were asking me about my identity and about where I came from. What were you, what were you looking for? So this is something I think a lot about, and I think a lot about it more and more every day. My understanding, based on conversations with some incredible psychologists and psychiatrists, people like I just had the amazing experience of talking to Doctor James Hollis, who wrote under Saturn's shadow on the healing and trauma of men.

Andrew Huberman

He also wrote the Eden Project about relationships. So he doesn't just write stuff about men. He writes stuff about stuff for men, women, everybody. On identity. And the way he put it, I think captures it best.

So I want to credit him, which is that we come into this world and we are essentially. There's some genetics, of course, that play a role. Body size, body shape, eye color, all this kind of stuff. But that so much of who we become in our early life relates to our parenting and our attachment. And then there's this weird phenomenon whereby we either unconsciously or sometimes consciously adopt the patterns of our parents, sometimes more from one parent, sometimes more from the other single parent home.

It varies, right? But we develop these patterns of thinking certain things, valuing certain things, believing certain things. And then adolescence and the teen years and the young adult years hit, and something really interesting happens. We either internalize those and carry them forward, or in some cases, we do not something different, but we consciously do the exact opposite. And it's at that point in our developmental trajectory that we really start to elaborate and change our sense of self.

And so a different way of putting this is we hear things growing up. We believe things. What got us affection, what got us punished, those things. We're internalizing them all the time. People from go are trying to get their needs met.

And then at some point, we become conscious of, like, oh, you know, like, that doesn't feel good when they do that, or that seems to cause conflict between them and other people when they do that. So I'm gonna do the exact opposite. Or, you know, we hear the message, you know, you can't trust these kind of people, or you can't trust them, or you can trust everybody. And for some reason, we go 180 degrees in the other way, and that evolves the family line. I mean, just think about it, how amazing it is that we can evolve or devolve our family line in one generation.

Jocko Willink

I've talked about. I've talked to a lot of parents, and especially when they're going through those teenage years with their kids, and the kids start doing things that clearly they're looking for. They're looking for conflict with their parents. And I know I did that. I know both my sisters did that.

It's kind of normal that you're going to have that rebellious phase. And what I tell parents is, you know, when you're 13 years old, you look at your parents and you say, wait. I need to. I'm going to need to go out on my own. I need to break away from these people somehow.

I need to make that happen. And so you just start making that happen and usually do a pretty good job of it. So that, to me, that's where a lot of that 180 can come from. Where you're looking at your parents. Oh, I'm not gonna.

I need to get away from them. I need to break the ties that I have with them, and I need to do that so I can go out on my own. And if I still have these ties to them, then I'll be stuck here forever. Yeah. It's amazing, because even in animals, there's this thing they call dispersal, where the animals hit a certain age and they just start, like, venturing out from the nest, and they do the same thing that kids do, of looking back to make sure that it's still there.

Andrew Huberman

Right. I have a friend who has spent a lot of years working with kids that, like, really, like, hardscrabble backgrounds, gangs, like, inner city stuff, and always said that, you know, those kids, like, all kids, are extremely appreciative of any kind of warmth or kind of nurturance. Like, they're not. It's not like the movies where they're just always resistant to that. They might not be as trusting immediately for understandable reasons, but that they appreciate and can understand and recognize, like, real generosity.

And so I think we all have that in us. We want that. But, yeah, there's this age where we just start dispersing. We just want to go. I mean, that was why pick skateboarding as, like, my first quote unquote real sport, right?

I did other things. I played soccer and swimming, but I needed a ride to those things where I could ride my bike. But the skateboard was a sport, and it was also transportation. And then when someone got a driver's license and admittedly, and don't do this, kids, even before they did, you know, we would start going places. Plus, soccer is sanctioned.

Jocko Willink

Oh, it's sanctioned by the parents. Right? The parents got you in there, and you're just kind of playing into the whole thing. Oh, you want to be. You're on the soccer team, you get sliced oranges, right?

It's all part of the. It's part of the nest. You're in the nest when you're playing soccer, when you're playing football, when you're doing whatever sports you're doing at school. Those are all sanctioned, and they're all part of the program. Right?

Skateboarding is not part of the program. No, no. And one of the great things about skateboarding was that, especially back then, it was all ages, so you didn't. You got a education in a lot of things, for better or worse. We talk about that.

Andrew Huberman

Learned a few things, you know? And it was wild. It was wild, you know, I don't care what anybody says, you know, it's like, it was wild, and it. How old were you? Started hanging out in the streets with.

Jocko Willink

With skaters. Yeah. So is this fun? Because basically, everybody on my street who was my age, like, there were all these young guys, and we all grew up together, and then they all started playing water polo and soccer. Sanctioned.

Andrew Huberman

Yep. And then it was me and really one other guy. His name was Paul zwanich. We just call him Zouch because you gotta have a nickname, right? And he was really good.

Jocko Willink

Wait, what was your nickname? Oh, come on now. Cubes. Cubes? Yeah.

Andrew Huberman

Just kind of rolled off the tongue. Yeah. Some people still call me that, but anyway, they're outed hubs. And we. You know, he was one of these guys who was just a natural athlete, and so when he went, he'd score five goals a game in soccer.

His mom was a soccer coach often. Then when we started skateboarding, and he could just. He was just so good. You could just call the trick. You could be like, hey, do, like, feeble in the backside, tail slide, and you'd be like, hmm, okay.

And he would just do it, and you're like, ugh. I struggled. Okay. I was not a great skateboarder, but, you know, I worked at it, and I love the community of it, loved everything about it. And so he and I started venturing further, going up to embarcadero, so called Emb.

So that was. I was probably 14 when we first took the seven f bus and started going up there. So about 1314. And that's where I saw it. All right.

And it's wild because in recent years, largely because of the podcast and social media, I'm now close friends with some of the guys that I grew up looking up to as legit heroes. Legit heroes. Cause I was the same age. I'm the same age as, like, danny way, who just celebrated birthday. Happy birthday.

Danny jumped the great wall of China. He's down here. He's from Vista, you know, so I saw those guys. I was around all of that, but I wasn't one of the really good skateboarders, so I could hang in there, but I gotta be friends with Carl Watson and all these guys. And so I've reconnected with them over in recent years.

But, yeah, Paul, she got a pro model with think pro model with planet Earth. Literally. It was the sponsor me tape, sent it in. One of my best friends sends in a tape, next thing you know, freaking Poe model, you know? So we were, like, in the community.

Very much so. But, yeah, in recent years, it's been amazing, because I've gotten to be friends with two people who were legit heroes for me growing up, and in many ways still are. One is Jim Thibault, very humble guy who runs Spitfire deluxe Thunder. Real skateboards. The nicest guy you'll ever meet.

He grew up in Albany, California. He's gonna be really embarrassed I'm saying this, but just the best dude. And he's played absolutely pivotal role in skateboarding. We're both huge fans of rancid. He's big, you know, like, cox bar fan and like, all, you know.

So we. We send each other morning, good mornings and music every. Almost every morning. Gone to shows. We actually went to a rancid show together not that long ago.

So Jim, growing up, was. He's few years older than me. It was like, generous Jim. He would show up at Embarcadero, would give people board stickers, wheels. I'll never forget the first time he gave me, like, first box of.

Of gear. And like, I was just like, whoa, not gear. Like gear. Gear, guys. Not injectable gear.

We're talking skateboard gear. And so, yeah, it was just amazing. It was so free. No parents, no regulation, which has its problems. But.

And then the other guy, you know. Cause I was always in a. From about 14 gym. And this guy, Wally Sueyashi, who unfortunately is dead now, gave me my first, like, real punk rock tape, stiff little fingers, tape, crimp, shrine, bands like that. And I fell in love with Operation Ivy downfall, which eventually rancid Tim Matlars and what used to be Brett, and now it's Brandon.

And they didn't know me. I didn't know them, but I go to all of their shows, and then in recent years, I've had this. It's kind of wild how life works out. I've been connected to and become very close friends with. We probably hang out two, three times a week with Tim Armstrong.

The Tim a rancid. And he's amazing songwriter. Just an amazing human being. And he and I will just go hours and hours talking about history of punk rock music, history of anything of that culture. And so, yeah, what I fell into early on and fell.

Truly fell in love with. And you and I also exchanged this, like, I think there's a CRO mag show tonight, right? Or, you know, it's. For me, it was just the home I needed. I think it's kind of interesting because recently there's been some interesting call into question about my backstory.

But listen, any one of those guys who's been in the industry for a long, long time, they'll say, yeah, I remember they called me Andy back then. I remember Andy. But I wasn't one of the main guys, meaning it was clear I wasn't fated to be a great skateboarder. So that was tough. That was God's first lesson in, like, you're gonna get broke off every time you push yourself a little too hard.

So it's a good lesson to push me into academia. But make a long story short. I mean, if ever there was a community to go feral into and be a part of, it was amazing. And some of those people became great artists. It was always adjacent to incredible stuff, like what giant was doing with, you know, the obey stuff and, like, graffiti art and twist and, you know, and so skateboarding, punk rock music, all that.

And I should just weave it around for a second, because we were talking about this a little bit earlier. Podcasting feels so much, so much the same way as the early iterations of punk rock and skateboarding, where it's like people are doing independent, right? It's diY. Set up some cameras in a room. You know, I'm sure people will see your podcast, hear your podcast, and think, like, oh, you must need, like, this huge production studio.

You need some stuff. But we started in a tiny room in my house in Topanga when I was doing a little self appointed retreat to Southern California during the pandemic. And so it's like, you set it up, you record, you edit, you put it out into the world. Skateboarders, it's 100% diY. So right now, I look at the podcasters, and I look at the enormous reach that the podcasters individually, of course.

Joe being way out in front of everybody else, who, by the way, check out how much he works. Check out how many episodes, folks. You know, it's like, you know, it's not a coincidence. I look at that, and I go, oh, yeah, it feels exactly the same. It's exactly the same.

And people, the general public often go like, whoa. Like, this thing feels really cool, and it feels kind of big, but, like, kind of scary. Like, you know, remember, like, you see somebody with, like, a bullet belt and something like that. And like, I mean, I remember in high school, this wasn't my thing. I never pierced, you know, ears or anything like that, but that was just my personal true.

I remember you saw someone with a tattoo and it was like, oh, they must be blank, or you saw somebody with an earring. They used to say all sorts of things about then, you know, four years later, it's mainstream. I remember one year in high school. Cause skateboarders unfortunately had, like, severe sag. One year in the early nineties, a 990.

Jocko Willink

Thankfully, I was already in the military, right? Small wheels, big baggies and. And I remember we got teased so much, it was unbelievable. We got teased, like, just ridiculed. Stuff thrown at us.

Andrew Huberman

Of course, we were, like, pretty wily, so we'd always get people back. I'm not gonna give people ideas, but, like, you know, you know, it's like high grade firecrackers and stuff. Like, you could get back at people. It was fun, but don't do it, kids. Things have changed.

But next year, after the summer, come back to school, everyone's dressing that way. And that's when it just clicked. And I go, oh, most people don't actually know what they like. They're looking outward to try and figure out what they like. And I guess I've either always been blessed or stricken with this thing.

Like, I feel something. It's just so cool. And I just feel it like an energy. I'm like, that is cool. That's cool.

What they're doing is real and they're doing it themselves. And so, like, I'm in. I wanna jump into music and skating and stuff a little bit. But what you just talked about. So kids are growing up and we are like, this is like I say, kids.

Jocko Willink

You could be 38 years old or 52 years old, which I am right now. And you have your perception of who you are and your self perception. And a while ago, we did a podcast. I was talking about the fact that everyone's insane. And why is everyone insane?

Well, it's because the definition of insane every. It's somewhat insane because the definition, the clinical definition of insanity is where your reality doesn't match reality. That's what so it's. And when they're off by a lot, you're. Now definition is insane.

Well, guess what? My perception of reality is not the same as your perception of reality. And neither one of our perceptions of reality is completely accurate. We have our own biases and tints to the lenses that we look at life through. So it can be difficult to know what reality is.

And then, of course, like you just said, like, you're a 14 year old skateboarder with baggy pants, and people are making fun of you cause of that. So now you're getting criticism from the outside world. How do you know what reality is? How do you know that you're not actually wearing stupid pants? Or do you think is the reality is that you're a trendsetter that everyone's gonna be imitating in a year?

They might be right. How do you weigh what you're hearing from the world as they tell you? Because also, if I'm jealous that you got a new skateboard, what do I say? Skateboarding, stupid. Or I'm jealous because my girlfriend likes you.

Well, then the way you dress is stupid, and she's an idiot, right? So I'm gonna attack you because I'm jealous. And that's a problem, too. But at the same time, it's like reading comments on the interwebs, right, rogan, classically, right? Don't read the comments.

Don't read the comments. Don't read the comments. And we all agree with it. But if you can read the comments and be like, yeah, there's going to be some outliers that think I'm an idiot and some outliers that think I'm perfect. And it's like, most people are going to be somewhere in between.

And that's cool. That's pretty realistic.

How are you judging what criticism you're getting? What kind of grain of salt do you take it with? Yeah. Sense of self, obviously, as we were talking about before, develops early. For some people, it's firmer than for others.

Andrew Huberman

Right? I mean, one of the reasons why, for me, it was skateboarding and punk rock music. And by the way, folks, I think a lot of people hear, like, punk rock music, and they just think, like, noise and we're talking, like, some amazing melodic stuff, like, all of it. Right? One of the reasons for me, the music piece was so key to just who I was.

I mean, if you look at my high school year, but my graduate, everyone else had, like, a photo or something. I think I actually made it to my senior photo, but you get to draw the thing in the back. Mine's the COVID of the operation Ivy energy lp with a few initials of people that helped me out, you know? And I showed Tim that recently, he was like, oh, yeah, cool. You know, in my PhD, which is somewhere online, because someone found her saying, in my acknowledgments, I acknowledge rancid.

They didn't know me, but I went to every show. I listened to them on non stop anyway. Like, these things are lifelines, you know? But one of the things is that, you know, people hear punk rock, they think noise or anger, whatever, there's a place for that. But the real spirit of it, and I think Joe Strummer summarized it the best, is like, it's about the real humanity of it.

It's about putting. It's about your heart. It's about putting your heart into what you do. Not in a soft way, although sometimes in a soft way, but it's about being true to yourself. And one of the things I love about every time I drive by, like, 924 Gilman street, one of the longest running punk rock clubs in the world, when I drive through Berkeley or something like that, and I see all the kids out front, is just the huge range of styles, high hold boots, you know, like bullet belt, spike belt.

The kid who's just wearing his, like, just wearing sneakers, you wouldn't even call him a punk rocker, but they're there. Or, you know, you get the mod kids and the goth kids and like, it's just all the styles, and you just hope. You just hope that they're expressing themselves in the way that feels right to them at the time. And, you know, skateboarding for a while did become a little too homogeneous. But the cool thing about skateboarding is, especially once we made it up from the south bay where I lived to embarcadero, was like the huge.

I mean, hear a lot about diversity nowadays. I mean, vietnamese kids, black kids, white kids, kids from the inner city, rich kids, poor kids, everything in between. There were fewer girls doing it back then. Now there's some girls that kill on skate. On skateboarding.

I mean, it's like, amazing. I mean, just unbelievable. I think her name is Reese Williams. I have to check it out. But, like, she skates Tony's ramp down here in San Diego.

It's like, unbelievable. With so much power, too. Not a little girl skating like. No, like power, right? And so what I love is when I see people expressing their uniqueness and they can still be part of a community, I see less of that online.

Although within the podcast community, I like to think that maybe 90% of the people that watch who maybe comment, they feel some resonance. Like, they feel resonance with your 04:30 a.m. Call to action. They feel resonance with Joe's desire. Because, you know, I can never speak for him.

How could I? But to explore lots of topics from lots of different angles and be kind of fearless about it. Not kinda delete fearless. Okay. Or Lex to, like, bring as much love and compassion to things, and people will spit at him, like, oh, you're just, you're kind of, like, using the softness to try and pretend that what you're showing isn't hard.

No, I know lex. I know him. I know his heart. He's a close friend of mine. He showed up in my house in times of crisis and all sorts of, like.

And we've sat down late into the night on and off. Mike, like, we are close, close friends. He has a huge loving heart and a huge curiosity to understand, and he'll go where he needs to. I think he's in the jungle right now. That's right.

Jocko Willink

I saw him check out. So, like, I know, like, you can't really, you can't. The thing about real podcasting or real anything, music, skateboard, you can't fake that. It's. It's from the heart.

Andrew Huberman

And when I say that, I think some people just say, like, oh, it sounds soft or something. And, you know, Tim, who's like a big brother to me now, he's always says, like, you know, there's a couple lyrics in there. He's like, there's this one lyric where he goes, I know I wear my heart on my sleeve, but he's a tough guy, too. And I think that what you have to understand is that for anything that's new, where there's no precedent, there's no, like, podcast playbook now, you can kind of figure it out and go and. But what you find is that, like, people are all in.

Cause it's, like, in their heart. I have to imagine that it's, like, in your heart to sit down and talk to people, perhaps like me from now and again. But people who have been, like, legit warriors, not like, playing war, but, like, war, where the other team is trying to kill you and talk about that from a place of understanding, also sensitivity, exploration. You can't make that up, right? That's not journalism.

That's called. That's real. And so, for me, it was like, you know, skateboarding, when I first saw that, was like, whoa. Punk rock music was like, whoa. Like, they're, they mean it.

They mean it. And same thing with podcasting and science, too. When I first got into research science and I had the incredible benefit of working with people that just loved the lab, and I just loved being in the lab. Love doing experiments here, just like it's you alone there with nature, trying to figure out how nature is put together. And there's just, like, there were times when I was just like, I can't believe this.

I can't believe that this is, like, a real thing and that they, like, give you a degree to do this. And then they eventually paid me to do it. So I don't want to get overly sentimental here, but I think that the sense of self that I hope people are trying to find is, like, their essence. And Hollis actually said to me yesterday, he said, you know, the key to finding this, because I said, okay, give me the practical tool. Right?

And he said, oh, very straightforward. He said, you got to get out of stimulus and response. You have to be able to sit with yourself for, like, 1015 minutes and just listen to, like, what's inside you and what moves you in a positive direction. And I said, that's it. And he said, yeah, but how many people do that every day?

How many people get up in the morning and do that? I did it this morning after he told me that. So how did it work out? Yeah, I mean, like, I think we all have an essence. Like, you know, not to get too spiritual here, but I think we all have an essence of who we're trying to be and what we're trying to put into the world.

And you mentioned criticism. I think one of the hard things about being public facing, and I'm not complaining, it's a great honor to do what we do, right. To be able to speak our thoughts and our conversations to the world is when people try and take something, look at it through a particular lens, and then somehow, without any clinical training and without any basis whatsoever, place intention on that, like, they could understand why you did what you did or what people did. You know, we're so. I see a lot of that.

People just sort of, like, projecting intention labels on people. And it's the great Joe Strummer. He said, there's a great quote. He says, it's time to take humanity back into the center of the ring. The problem is we've been dehumanized.

I think he said, greed. It ain't going anywhere. And put that up in a Times Square, something like that. Never met him, but I would have loved to, but that's true. There's a dehumanization.

When we put a label on somebody out, like a pathologized label, we're dehumanizing them. And I see a lot of that on the Internet. As probably people can tell. I'm pretty passionate about this, not just from my own experience, but frankly, more from the advocacy for others, not just podcasters, but like, I look at the way people attack one another, and I'm just like, well, first of all, on the schoolyard or the marcadero or where you come from or you come from, and then, you know, like, none of that's gonna fly, right? Cause it's gonna go to.

It's gonna go to loggerheads and fists quick, because that's real life, sadly, too. But that's kind of how things got handled throughout history on the Internet. It really is. People just lobbing stuff over walls. And the anonymity is part of the problem, but also the harshness of it.

I mean, every time I hear about a kid who commits suicide based on online bullying, crazy. I'm like, whoa. And I was just like, what must have they been feeling? And then what must have the other people been feeling? This is like.

I mean, it does break your heart. It's insane. And I think that. Yeah, I mean, I think that we. The humanity is really about what Hollis said.

It's about knowing who you are, touching into that, and then having the support, hopefully, but just the guts to just express yourself the way you see yourself, and then understand that people are gonna make fun at you. They're gonna do all sorts of things, but the people that used to get spit on and teased and all that, they're the ones that everyone's mimicking the next year, two years later, it's so wild to see that those are the fashions. Those are the things. If you can count on anything, it's that. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

When I think about growing up really into hardcore music, obviously, and some of the things that I think about that I totally. They became embedded in my life, right? They kind of became part of who I am. No, let me rephrase it. They became part of who I was and who I am.

And for one thing, and you know this, you get this crew of friends, and they're like your bros, your brothers, and so you get this super tight brotherhood of friends, and your just doing stuff together, going out. There's. There's fights, right? You just mentioned it. Like, there are fights.

And so there's a test, right? You are gonna get tested and you're gonna see how you react. You're gonna see how your friends react. And the people that react the right way become tighter. They become a tighter element of friends.

And I've actually talked about the fact that I did a lot of dumb stuff when I was a kid based on the fact of, I wanted to prove to myself and to my friends that I was, like, a tough guy. That's why I love Jiu jitsu, because in jiu jitsu, you don't have to do anything to prove. If you want to prove something, go to the mats. And we know exactly where everyone falls in the pecking order, and it's all good. Before Jiu jitsu, you don't have that.

The only way to do it is like, oh, we're gonna go get and fight. So it's dumb, but you get that tight group of friends that have now been through something together. The whole idea for me of straight edge, which was a very radical thing. I mean, this is in the. In the eighties, right where I grew up, there was just not a.

It wasn't a thing at all. Like, drinking and smoking pot and doing whatever LSD. Like, that stuff was just kind of the normal way to go through high school. That's what was happening. So the idea of straight edge and for me, what I connected to was like, oh, gonna be strong.

Like, I'm gonna be strong. I'm gonna be mentally strong. Be physically strong. Like, we started working out and had nothing to do with echo. Charles over here was working out because he wanted to get a little bit more buff.

Like, I was working out to be stronger so I could be better friend, a better friend to my friends and be strong. So that that became part of my soul of, okay, I'm gonna be strong. I'm gonna be mentally strong. I'm gonna try and be mentally strong. They go working towards that, by the way.

It's all I have, like, the most ridiculous. I have the most ridiculous writings from when I'm a kid, you know, and I still have them, but they're just, you know, I can't be weak about this. I need to be stronger, need to be better. Like, that's what I was writing when I was 14. It's kind of crazy.

So I think the way all that stuff landed on me and by the way, this was all, like, this was all. It'd be like, you know how they, the animals in Australia, they kind of became these. Their own things, like kangaroos and what, platypus. Like, all these weird animals in Australia, we kind of became this weird sort of offshoot of what we knew, what we found out. Cause I lived in the sticks, man, and so we kind of became our own little offshoot of what we thought this was supposed to be, man.

The first time I had Harley Flanagan on the podcast, and I read his book, and he's like. I mean, he's doing heroin. I mean, he's just off the freaking rails. Yeah. There was a segment within hardcore and punk that was, like, heavy into drugs.

Andrew Huberman

There was the straight edge, although it was less prominent. It was Ian. Ian mcKay. Those guys. Yeah, but we didn't know that.

Jocko Willink

I thought, you know, listening to the CRO mags and listening to minor threat, I thought that, okay, this is what it is. And I kind of took those couple threads, and me and my buddies, we made that our thing. This is what we're doing. And so that was very instrumental in the way. Cause I'm going back to.

This is when you asked me how, you know, where'd you get your identity from? I just. After the podcast I started when you were coming down, I was like, where did what? Who. Where did I come from?

Another thing that's huge in that music and in that spirit, as you mentioned, is, like, rebellion. Like, we're not gonna conform with something else just because it's there. We're gonna do what we think is, for lack of a better word, the right thing to do. We're gonna do what we think is the good thing to do. And so we kind of developed this whole.

This whole ideology, really. And part of it was like, oh, yeah, I'm not gonna. If something doesn't make sense, I'm not gonna conform. Right? That's not happening.

So then you take that. Then you have this. Trying to be really good at what you're doing, and I was definitely into that. Not in school, not in education. Neither is.

Oh. But with what we're doing skating, like, we're gonna do our best to become good at skating. Good at, like, trying to work out. So the things we were trying to get good at, wanting to represent well, and the hard work idea, the working class idea of, like, hey, we're working hard. And the Dui thing or diy thing you already mentioned, and that's a huge thing.

I mean, why do I have a publishing company? Well, because. Oh, you can't publish my book. And time calls and make my own. That's complete from the spirit of my youth.

Same thing with starting a podcast. You don't. You can just do this. What do you do? There's no.

You don't need a producer. You don't need. You don't need anything. All you need is an iPhone, and you can start a podcast. So there's a diy thing behind that.

And. And then the last thing that I was thinking about was this group of friends that you had, that I had.

You didn't want to let your friends down. You didn't want to be a blood clot. You didn't want to be, like a liar or a. You didn't want to let your friends out. You had this sense of honor, right?

It was like we. You're not going to let your friends down. And that had a huge. A huge impact on me of, hey, it doesn't matter what happens. You don't want to let your friends down.

That's a huge thing. And then all that stuff right there, again, me trying to trace my freaking personal identity. Now I roll into the military, and guess what you learn out of the gate going. Going through seal training, is you don't let down your swim buddy. You put the team first.

That's what's going to happen. It does not that it was a perfect crossover for me. A perfect crossover me. You don't want to let your friends down. That's.

That's what we're doing. You want to put the team first. You want to do the right thing. You have to do the right thing. This is something that.

Again, look, let's give Ian McKay credit from minor threat. Like, he was just doing what he thought was right and going against everybody and just standing up and doing what he thought was right. Look, I was listening to black Flag and Rollins huge, huge influence on me. Black flag, my war side to just listening to that album for a year, just that side for a year and a half, over and over again. It's like, that's gonna leave a mark on you.

Andrew Huberman

Absolutely. It's gonna etch your neural circuits. There's a black flag live album where Rollins is just yelling, the discipline. I am the discipline, and here I am. I'm probably 1314 years old.

Jocko Willink

Did that leave a mark? Yeah, it left quite a mark. And yet the weird thing is, like, there was people that were listening to black flag that were heroin addicts. Heroin addicts, right. And here I am going, oh, I took that and made it into what I thought was the thing.

Oh, I understand what he means by that. We went kind of, like, on tour with Rollins band in the late eighties, and so we'd hang around with Rollins and he would be doing push ups, and, you know, I'm. He's. I think he's. He's.

He's ten years older than me, so when I'm 14, he's 24. So he's like a grown dude and I'm a little kid, but it's like, okay, we're doing push ups. That's what we're doing. Okay. We're working out.

He's getting ready to go on stage. What's he doing? He's working out. He's stretching. Like, that's what we're doing.

So I took all that stuff and it just made so much sense to me and I formed it into what I thought it was. And some of it I was just inaccurate on, you know, I sat down with Harley Flanagan for the first time. I realized, man, I was way. I'm glad I was off base. I'm glad I was off base because the direction he was going, not too many people survived.

He's lucky to be alive. I didn't do that. I was like, oh, what, what this means is discipline. What this means is working hard. What this means is supporting your friends.

And that's, as I look at my identity, so much of it came from that. And then getting in the teams where it's, oh, you take care of your, your teammate, you put the team first, you do the right thing. You. You gotta be tough. Like, same thing when you're skateboarding.

You fall down. What do you say? Oh, I'm gonna go home now. No, you get up and try again. You will rub dirt and you get up and you go again.

That's the freaking seal teams. The seal teams. You're tough. Like, oh, you got hurt. Cool, keep going.

Oh, you. You got dinged up. Cool, keep going. Don't even say anything about it. Don't say, I'm cold.

You don't say, I'm tired. You don't say, I need a break. You don't say that stuff. You don't say it. I know there's probably a bunch of bad ramifications because of that.

Okay? But when you're 25 years old, 21 years old, 32 years old, that's what you're doing. You're not. You're not taking a break. Another huge piece was in, especially now I'm in the SEAL teams.

You're not going to be the best at anything. Like, there's a guy that is going to be better than you at shooting, there's going to be someone else that's better than you running, someone's better. You, in swimming, someone's. So you're not going to be the best at anything. And you just have to own that.

You have to be. You just get humbled by everyone around you and it keeps you humble. And then on top of that, combat keeps you humble. Because when you go to combat, there's all these things that you can't control, all these things going to happen, and they're going to unfold, and you're going to be looking around, and you're going to say, I'm at the whim of what's going on right now, and I got to hang on and try and get it figured out. So it's very, very humbling to have that happen.

Being squared away, does that mean anything to the civilian sector echo, Charles? Be squared away? I mean, you can imagine, but that doesn't. That's not, like, a common thing that everyone's going around saying, andrew, squared away. I mean, I've heard it.

Andrew Huberman

Done a few scuba dives or a team guy on one of those. Yeah. Getting squared away is that when just all your shit's in order, your shit's dialed in. Right. There was phrases.

Jocko Willink

I need to bring these phrases back. There's satisfactory, which is sat, like that. Sat or unsat? Which? Unsat.

And that was it. It was just those two choices. A binary choice. You either were sat, you were ready, your stuff was squared away, or it wasn't. You're unsat.

So you get this programming where it's. The worst thing to do is be unsat, is to be not ready. Oh. To show up to a dive and be like, oh, hold on. I don't have my knife or hold on.

My rigs. I didn't bring this part of my rig or all those things, is like, you're letting everyone down. You're letting everyone down when you make those mistakes. So there's this weird. This weird paranoia that I got from that I, to this day, have a level of paranoia of wanting to be squared away, like, yep.

Squared away. At worst case scenario. Yep. You want to be squared away going. Going on an archery hunt, right.

You're going on an archery hunt to show up and not have all of your shit dialed in. To me, I would. I mean, I was so freaking paranoid. In the seal teams now, it's archery hunting. It's like, oh, check, check, check.

Recheck, recheck, recheck. Get everything dialed in. Be ready for that operation. Cause I don't wanna be the guy that fails and lets down the team. So those things again, when I got to the seal teams, we, a group of us, we kinda took the spirit that we thought was the right thing, and we ran with it.

Andrew Huberman

I love it. I love it. The rebellion piece is something I. It's ringing in my mind, because what starts off as rebellion, as we talked about a moment ago, eventually just becomes mainstream and what's cool, and I think is exciting. And I'm looking to where this is going to happen in the podcast community is when rebellion happens within the rebels.

So examples from the important cultures of history that we're talking about are, for instance, Joe Stromer, one on one ers thing starts, excuse me, starts to clash. Clash just blows up. It's like a worldwide sensation that, I mean, should I stay or should I go? You know, people hear the clash and they, you know, like, those are like pop music. At that point, he starts bringing in hip hop as openers, and the punks start booing.

They boom. Like, who are these guys? And he's like, no, you don't get it. This is the. This is the thing.

So then he starts to realize the hypocrisy of it all internally. I don't see hypocrisy inside the podcasting community. That's not what I'm saying. But the moment someone starts rebellion within the community of rebels, that's cool, because what that means is that it's going to evolve. Skateboarding.

This happened in numerous ways. The examples that come to mind, and there are many, danny Way is skateboarder. He's skating big vert. He was considered the little kid that could hold up with Tony Hawk. They tried to create this false, like, competition between them, and, like, it was ridiculous because they're.

They're homies and, like, whatever, they just do the same thing differently. Both great. Danny starts. Danny breaks his neck. A fractured vertebrate.

Surfing, I believe it was Newport, comes back, decides he's not going to jump motorcycles in the desert and surf as much anymore. He's going to take skateboarding to the next level. He starts building mega ramps and jumping over, you know, going 40 miles an hour or something. Actually, a friend of ours who's a photographer for our podcast, Mike, forgive me, I'm going to tell this story, but I think Mike was set one day to go film. He's been the photographer for DC for a long time, and I think he was supposed to go take a picture of some guy, like, skateboarding, some street thing.

And this is the quote I'm paraphrasing. I think Danny says to him, you want to go see someone do, like, a crooked grind on a knee high ledge, or you want to see someone fly through the air at 45 miles an hour for 100ft upside down, like Danny was doing. He's evil Knievel. What did he do, though? He started building that.

But then the other thing, I'll never forget he's working out. He's training his neck. He's training. He's training hard. He's doing like these, like Cyclone, like rope ball swings.

And in skateboarding, if you worked out you were prior to that, you were a jock, that was not considered, okay, Danny broke the mold. He's taken his body and his health seriously. Cause he keeps getting hurt. He had the neck thing. I think he worked with Paul, check also, and getting strong doing all this stuff.

Next thing you know, he's breaking multiple world records. So he rebelled within the community of rebels. And I don't know him super well, but we occasionally talk still. And he just has this spirit like it was for him, a slayer. Slayer.

Echo Charles

Slayer. Like, you know, all the time. Him and the so Red Dragons, his little gang in skateboarding, that wasn't a part of. And he rebelled within the community of rebels. So then it evolved.

Andrew Huberman

Now you got have this whole new dimension of skateboarding, x games, mega ramps and all this stuff. So this stuff repeats. You see it in science. It used to be you were an anatomist or a physiologist or this or that. All of a sudden, somebody who's a neurobiologist.

There's a woman up at Stanford who years ago, many years ago, 1998, Carla Schatz decides, no, I'm going to study the immune system. Everyone says the brain is an immune privileged organ. That is not true, by the way. But back then, that's what they thought. She starts studying immune neural interactions.

It's an entire field, you can probably get a degree in it. Now, what year was that that she kicked out? About 1998 is when she started looking around at immune molecules in the brain. She had already done spectacular work. So, you know, and I'll tell you, I know academia very well.

And even though my lab is vastly shrunk now, I still have a lab, I still teach, despite what you might read on the Internet. Still a professor at Stanford, last time we checked. Just a few days ago, they called me. Still very involved. But the point here is that academics and academia is very insular.

Why? Everyone's afraid to rebel. Why? Because anonymous peer review of your grants and papers. Biggest fear?

You can't get papers published. How do you get papers published? You need money to fund the product. How do you do it? You write grants, your grants are reviewed by your peers.

Everyone is terrified of upsetting each other. So the party line becomes the line. Very hard to rebel. Some people get independent funding from other sources and they can be a little bit more adventurous. But it is one of the most.

It used to be this way when funding was more readily available, but it's one of the most, like, yes, communities. Like, yeah, you. You go. You go, like, rebels are. It's not really.

Not really okayed, but, you know, Carla was, in the best sense of the word. She broke the mold multiple times. Other people have done it, too. These are just kind of salient examples. And then another example from skateboarding that non skateboarders will probably hear.

Rob Dyrdek here was a guy who skateboarders, great skateboarder. I used to see him around, and then he turned to our friend Mike Blayback, who's the photographer of my podcast, one of my closest friends. And he is like, I want you to start filming me. Mike's not a filmer. Never call a photographer a filmer.

Take photos of me. He got himself a bodyguard, big. A bulldog, and started a tv show, and he became a businessman. You weren't supposed to do that. You weren't supposed to be, like, an athlete businessman.

He's like, he's now. He does a lot of stuff on entrepreneurship. He's a super impressive entrepreneur. So I love it when people are breaking rebels, rebelling within the community of rebellion. And it seems to me that within the seal teams, it's a little harder to do because there's a, like, high risk, high consequence outcome, you know, situations.

Right. I mean, it's war. Right. So it feels like there's probably less room, but I'm wondering, like, in jiu jitsu, has anyone. Is it Gordon Ryan, who's considered the man?

Jocko Willink

Yeah. Actually had the privilege of talking to him recently. He called me about some. Some stuff. He had some questions, hopefully was able to help him.

Andrew Huberman

But, like, I mean, is a guy like that, somebody who just kind of, like, does it differently or just does it more? Does it better? Yes, yes, and yes. Okay, well, there you go. Rebels against it.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And anyway, I'm going long, but I guess the point is that, like, breaking the mold among the mold breakers is how it evolves, and I'm excited to see what's gonna happen now in public communication, podcasting, et cetera, because it's. We're all very different, but I don't know. I feel like we're on the.

On the cusp of something. Yeah. There's also the whole commercial side coming in to the podcast, like that. They're not doing what you're doing, and they're not doing what I'm doing. They're doing something different.

Jocko Willink

They're doing something very different, which is massively, highly produced shows. And do people watch those? Listen to those? Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman

Are they popular? Oh, yeah. I mean, some of them are huge. Some of those are huge, and they have huge backing and they're owned by someone and they get a, you know, to me, it's all good. I mean, if that's what people are into, that's cool.

Jocko Willink

Hey, you mentioned the Internet and all this kind of stuff. You just kind of, you just kind of popped up for the first time with some scrutiny, like public scrutiny and article and stuff like this. What was that? What was that all about? What was that like?

Andrew Huberman

Yeah, I mean, we started the podcast in January 2021, and so it grew really quickly. And honestly, like, I didn't know it was gonna grow quickly. 2020, I was on 2019. I started posting stuff to Instagram. 2020.

During the kind of like the peak of the lockdowns, I started going on some podcasts. No book, no nothing. Just trying to give people health tools and teach them some science. We launched it in January 2021, and whoosh. Just kind of took off and kind of figured, like, sooner or later you start taking, you start getting some criticism.

I think the first thing that happened prior to that was people started supplements. People were like, oh, it's supplement thing. It's kind of obvious. You have sponsors that makes the podcast free so that you don't pay wallet, so it's available to everybody. I happen to like supplements.

I've been taking them since I was in high school, and I've benefited from them a lot. And I understand that they are different than stuff that is from randomized controlled trials. Oftentimes, there's not a ton of testing of the different things, but anyone who uses the right ones can tell you, like, okay, there's something there, and they may or may not choose to do. It depends on disposable income, interest, etcetera. But they're not the foundation of what we teach in the podcast.

It's almost all behavioral tools, information. So that was kind of the first wave that kind of hit. And when that happened, I was kind of like, well, these people look like they could use a few supplements. Just kidding. What I thought was, listen, if you want to take them, they can take them.

And if they don't, they don't like, the information is free. It allows it to be free. Yeah, the recent stuff was interesting because it was, in many ways, it could have just been titled like, you know, Andrew Huberman is a bad person because. Because it really, like, sought to really just like, undermine every aspect of, like, who I am, you know, and who I know myself to be and who my friends know me to be. You know, this idea that, like, okay, my backstory or whatever, you know, it's like, listen, actually one of the.

I'll tell you a brief story. One of the best things to come out of that was a guy named Steve Ruge Shrugi, who no longer smokes a lot of weed, doesn't smoke weed at all. But back then when I was a kid, he did. He was 14. And there's a true story that I got pulled out of high school and put away and I got one call and I called Steve because he was my friend, team manager for Spitfire Thunder.

But I wasn't one of the good skateboarders, as I mentioned before. So it was unclear whether or not I was on the team or he was just being kind. It was out of sympathy. And I called him and I go, shrug, you know, like, I'm in this place, I don't know what to do. And he goes, bro, you're the most normal guy I know.

He goes, you know, and you know what's funny is they interviewed him for this piece. They interviewed a lot of people, but they didn't use his piece. But what he did is he wrote to me after the interview. He goes, oh, yeah, I talked to them and, you know, and I told them I had put you on Thunder and Spitfire. And I go, you did?

And I go. And I go, you did? I waited 30 years to 33 years to know. It turns out I was actually on Thunder and Spitfire. So I was like, yes.

Like, if nothing else, it was totally worth it for that. So in any event. But you got three pairs of trucks. Totally. It was purely accurate.

I mean, I went to the Reno nationals, but I didn't do very well. Like, listen, I would have cut. I would have done anything to be one of the skateboarders that could really make it. But he was actually kind enough at a different point to tell me, look, he goes, bro, you're never going to be one of the big guys in skateboarding. And I remember just being so heartbroken.

But it was a gift, right, that he told me that because it turns out I need to do something with mind more than skateboarding. In any event. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, I think when you take a step back and go, hey, like, what generates clicks, right? It's rarely like, oh, this podcast is doing really well.

Time magazine had done a really nice piece which had balance in it where they kind of touched on how the podcast was really making an effort to teach science and also health and health and also science. This was not that. And it was interesting because I know me. I've got. Fortunately, I have tons and tons of friends I'm really close with.

I'm in contact with some of them less often than others. And yeah, sometimes I get busy and I don't text back as much, but I have people that I talk to every single day. I exchange a good morning text with, like, four or five people, including Armstrong, Thibault, and a few other people. Every single morning we hang out, we spend time in person. Right?

They interviewed an ex girlfriend of mine who was super awesome, actually, we met here in San Diego in supporting me. And then, of course, there was some assertions about me and my character. And that's where it gets down to this thing where it's like, look, I mean, we as humans are complicated. We do some things right, we make mistakes. But to ascribe intention to, like, why people do things like, that was the part where I thought, like, they're like, you know, they sort of tried to tie, like, dopamine neurobiology to protocols in the podcast to, like, some diabolical, like, even the COVID phones, like, diabolical, like, controlling mastermind.

Listen, I'm just trying to get through the week. Like, I'm pretty squared away on the order of a day or a week. I'm thinking next episode, there was no, and there's never been any master plan to do anything except one thing. Like, I genuinely, like, I know this in my heart, is that my desire has always been to put valuable information into the world that people can benefit from and to do it at zero cost, and to do that to the best of my ability. Right.

And also to do the most amount of good and the least amount of harm in life, in all aspects of life. And, of course, you know, nobody's perfect, and I certainly am not. And, you know, there was. If I'm going to just be direct about it, I mean, I think there are a couple things. One is, first of all, like, there is no version of me or life where, like, I'm validating or supporting behavior that is common but not good, right?

I think that was something to kind of be born out of that. Like, oh, you know, six girlfriends. Okay, look, I've had challenges maintaining one girlfriend. Okay, I think we can talk about this a little bit more. But this is where it gets to the importance of defining the relationship and what a relationship, you know, that's an important label, right?

I mean, girlfriends of mine, I met my family, we spend time together, you know that. Met their families. That's a girlfriend, right? Okay. It doesn't mean that other people are insignificant.

It just means it's a different nature of relationship. But I would never want to validate or support, like cheating, right? Listen, I've been cheated on. It sucks. It sucks.

I've cheated on people, and that sucks. And so I would never, ever, and especially now, because I'm saying it, want to validate or support that as a success, right? Like that. That represents failure. Cheating represents failure, not success.

That's clear. The other thing that's really important is, I think, like, we have to all be careful about not pathologizing behavior. And how do we pathologize behavior? We give people labels. We call them sociopaths, or we decide or non clinically appointed people to say, oh, that's a narcissist, or that's gaslighting or something like that.

I think one of the great things about human beings is that we can look at ourselves, we can look at others, and we can try and take understanding and accountability and try and do that without self flagellating or flagellating other people, because only then is there a chance of people changing their behavior. So, you know, those, you know, that whole thing, you know, some of it, I just was like, what? Like, you know, being probably one of the most, I just had to, like, literally laugh out loud is like that I doted on my bulldog excessively. Listen, if you want to know somebody's heart, look how they treat their animals. You know, look at.

I mean, it actually runs counter current to the clinical diagnosis of sociopathy, which they also sort of, like, alluded to. Right? I love animals. So, you know, to be criticized or kind of poked at for, like, you know, making sure that my bulldog Costello was tucked in. Like, hey, he liked being tucked in with his blanket, you know, and I love seeing him comfortable, and I like, you know, it like, it.

And it broke my heart to see him cold or like, you know, and, like, I mean, I have only two words for anyone that has a problem with how well I took care of my dog and I'm not going to be, you know, I think the scientific explanation is fuck you.

Jocko Willink

It had to be weird. You know, I was thinking about this, and we were talking about a little bit prior to, but. And you just mentioned kind of your trajectory to go from a person that, I mean, in 2018, you were just like, a working stiff dude. Like, doing normal working stiff stuff, writing. Grants, writing papers on advisory boards.

Andrew Huberman

2018. Driving back from at that time. Oh, no, I had moved to my place off Piedmont Ave in Oakland. Did you buy one? Did you own a place there?

Yeah, I had a little place out there. So you were established enough that you owned a place? Small place. So when I. So I was first a professor at San Diego, so I finished my postdoc at Stanford, got hired at UC San Diego.

That was very end of 2010, early 2011. I lived in normal Heights. I was, you know, it was the pit of the market. I was able to buy a little craftsman home, live there with my bulldog, Costello, and tucked him in every night. Talk to men every night.

I love that dog. And then met my then girlfriend, Keegan, who was kind enough in that, you know, it was interesting that these, these media things, you know, that they, there's a data selection in terms of what's emphasized, but she very graciously reported, we had a pretty awesome relationship of living here. She had a dog, she had a little pit bull. So it was Costello and Zoe, and we lived there in normal heights. And then she eventually went up to do some schooling up north.

I was going back and forth, and then when I took what, when I got moved to Stanford, meaning I got offered a job at Stanford, got tenure at Stanford on entry in 2016 and 2016, and we were living literally in a basement apartment off High street. It was pretty rough zone back then. I think maybe it's a little lighter now, but commuting, doing that. And then eventually we parted ways and I got my own place off B Bon Ave in Oakland and was commuting and doing the academic. Then you're just working, traveling the world.

Like, working like a mania. I've always worked, like somewhere between like 70 and 80, sometimes 100 hours a week. Sometimes I throttle back. Now it's a little more segmented, but, yeah, then 2021, start the podcast, and all of a sudden it's like, whoa, I didn't, when I put stuff out into the world, I mean, this is what's also, so, I think, important for people to understand about these online things and media and all this. And we could talk about this a lot if you want, is that it's like a one way conversation in many ways, but then you're like, catching it back through a fire hose.

Right. So you have to, you do develop a really thick skin, right. You know, people are gonna say stuff, you know, I think that it's very different than a one on one conversation. And to just also, like, make sure that I'm rounding the corners on what we were just talking about. Like, I understand that, you know, my podcast isn't for everybody.

It's kind of long winded. It gets down into the weeds, although we have some shorter content coming, some 30 minutes, audio only, summary type stuff that I'm hoping people will enjoy if the other stuff's too long. But, you know, I understand. Cause I grew up intentionally doing different, looking different, acting different, because it was what was in my heart that people are not going to like it. And I also understood that there are people that are going to like it.

And I also understood that in a couple years, people kind of drift towards it, and by then, we're already on to the next thing. And that frustrates the hell out of everybody. It frustrates the hell out of everybody. But we don't do it intentionally. Right.

There isn't, again, there's no diabolical plan. You know, I once saw a quote that of Rogan. Maybe it's accurate, maybe it's not. But he described himself as, like, the fish that got through the net that there's no on. You know, he's just being himself.

There's something so refreshing to people just being themselves. And I think that, so for me, I'll put stuff out into the world, and I'm not thinking about, like, are they gonna like it or they knock. I'm just doing the best I possibly can. And, of course, I make mistakes. Like, this is the funny thing.

Like, the idea that, like, I saw some headlines that were kind of derivative headlines or, like, you know, the, the falling of, like, mister perfect. Like what? Like, anyone that knows me and that's close to me knows, like, I've said it before on Lex's podcast. I'm like, I'm replete with flaws because I'm a human being and I'm always trying to do the best I can. And if, like, someone has an issue with me and they want to talk about it one on one, I will absolutely, every time, I will do my best to work that out with them.

Now, when things are getting vetted publicly, that's a whole different business because now it's a dialogue that you can't control. And it's people can say whatever they want. They can put whatever labels, and then you have to understand the incentive schemes, too, which is that they're trying to sell clicks and they're trying to get their angst out, and people are resentful, or people love you and people hate you. And I think we were talking about this before. Here's my thesis these days, and I've talked to a couple legitimate psychiatrist, psychologists, and so far, it's three for three.

The Internet and social media in particular is borderline. Borderline. Borderline personality, not bipolar. But borderline. Borderline means literally weaving back and forth across the line from healthy, logical, sane to psychotic.

It's either projecting at you love and adoration, or it's projecting hate and vitriol, and you can't control which one it's gonna be. So when I go online now, I'm like, okay, I'm going on x, which I enjoy. I really like x. I don't know why. Maybe because I like a little bit of a scrap.

Get in there. And it's like, it's borderline. You're gonna get psychotic stuff. You're gonna get sane stuff. There's some smart people, there's some dumb people, but that's what you're dealing with.

You're dealing with a borderline organism. And I don't know who said this, but the larger the group, the lower the level of consciousness. Somebody said that? Not me. Just repeating it.

So I think when you're out facing or even if you're just on the Internet, you got to know what you're dealing with. Yeah. No, but I would hope that if you or you ever had an issue with me that you call me up and you'd be like, hey, dude, you need to get your ass down to San Diego. We need to have a conversation. And actually, a team guy that I'm friends with and I, end of year, had to have a long one.

Like, a long one where we. We kind of. And, yeah, like, words were said and tears were shed. That wasn't supposed to rhyme, but it did. And it fucking hurt.

It hurt. It hurt hearing that I'd done some things that, like, I wish I hadn't. And it hurt for me, him, like, not understanding. Like, dude, we were trying to tell you this, and you, you know, and at the end, we, like, got off the phone, and you just go, man, I hope that was for the best. Guess what?

He was at my house recently with his son. We're good. We hike. Yeah, there's still some, like, stuff there, but he's gone through some stuff recently, family wise, totally unrelated to. And it's like, you're close.

That's intimacy. That's actually how you bridge a divide. And to me, like, the idea that people are gonna, like, sling stuff as a way to try and work things out, the one person I've worked things out with purely physically is Johnny Ferrer. His name is funny with all these knives. Call him dagger.

Unfortunately, he's dead. Suicided out in 2017. You know, that's one thing that pissed me off about that, right? When people were like, oh, these kids that, you know, died. Listen, anyone want to go check?

Like, John Eickleberry, Aaron Curry. Also named Aaron King, a great graffiti artist named Orphan or FN. And Johnny Ferrer, three rad kids I grew up with who eventually went to the graffiti game bike messenger. Like, wild ones. All three of them died.

End of year. It was fentanyl for John Eickleberry. Orphan. Aaron King. Also Curry, because he was in a foster home.

Last name Curry, stomach cancer. He was in the Moma, San Francisco Moma from a street before he died. And then Johnny Ferrer. Sad situation, but raddest kid. When we were kids, one day we were on the bus, I said something about his mom, dumb idea.

He's half my size. He goes, well, then come. Come over here. And I'm like, what? And he come over and he hit me.

Done. Okay, then. Now we scrap. And honestly, this kid, half my size, he beat me up. He beat me up.

And guess what? We were best friends after that. So it used to get handled that way nowadays, somebody would pull out a gun or a knife and, like, you know. But the scrap thing used to work on the Internet. Name calling is not going to solve it in person the way you do it.

You sit down, you have a conversation, and it hurts. And I will say now and for the record and forever, I'm always open to having private one on one conversations with people to resolve things if the goal is resolution. Or people can, like, keep pain in their hearts and move forward, you don't always get that opportunity, and that's sad to me. Or you can let that pain out on twitter. Yeah, or you can.

Or you can leverage other things to try and get it out. But I don't know. I know. Anyway, the point is, this is, like, I have certain patterns in me that I'm sure are healthy. Certain patterns in me that are unhealthy, of course.

Like, I'm always trying to reflect. Like, that's just who I am. I'm always trying to reflect on how I can be better and do better. But again, I am replete. Look up the word folks with flaws.

But I like to think I get certain things done well, too. Anyway, I'm going along here on this, but if we ever have an issue, just talk to me first. Hit me second.

Jocko Willink

Yeah, you and I were talking about that. We were on the phone, actually. We were talking about the Internet, and you told me about that idea of it being a borderline person, and I brought the definition, clinical definition, of a borderline personality disorder, mental health condition in which a person has long term patterns of unstable or explosive emotions, mood swings, extreme love to extreme hate of same person, all good or all bad, inappropriate or intense anger, chronic emptiness, plunging headfirst into relationships, then ending them just as quickly. That's the Internet. Don't you love it when people tell you they're going to unfollow you?

Freaking nailed it, bro. So we have to ask Jonathan Haight, you know, who's out there talking about social media and all this? Have you had them on here? I have not. Yeah, I haven't had them on my podcast either.

Andrew Huberman

But, like, I mean, I think this social media thing in the Internet that we built, this thing, this creature. I mean, we're now starting to understand, like, what's the biology and psychology. Yeah, what's the psychology of this. This creature that we interact with constantly and that we're a part of? It's wild is a creature.

Jocko Willink

It has a personality, right. And it's a split personality support. My current girlfriend is a. She's trained in cs and AI from. She has an undergrad and a grad degree from Stanford.

Andrew Huberman

No, we didn't meet at Stanford. This is like a theory on the Internet. No, she worked at meta after that, and now she's. But she teaches AI online. It's awesome.

I don't understand most of it. She's brainiac. She's like, it's a brain. Like, the Internet is a brain. It's a nervous system, it's a neural system, and it has personality, and it has dimensionality to it.

And it's kind of interesting. For the last 15 years, it was all about neuroscience. Everything's the brain. Now it's all about math and AI. Everyone's talking math and AI.

The kids coming up are into it. I'm trying to learn these large language models, what they mean. I mean, I barely understand the top contour, but, yeah, these are. It's an organism. It has expression, it has moods.

It hallucinates. I know it's. My AI has hallucinations, and then it gives you the wrong thing, and, like, it's wild, and I'm not afraid of it. I'm excited. Like, here we go.

This might as well be skateboarding, punk rock podcasting. Like, this is the next iteration. Have you tried to AI yourself on one of the. Have you said, hey, I'm feeling kind of low energy today. What would Andrew Huberman advise me to do?

Jocko Willink

Have you tried that? I haven't. I mean, I played around with chat GPT a little bit. We have an AI thing for our podcasts. My team built it.

Andrew Huberman

Some people prefer that. I'm, I'm like, I'm not cautious. I'm just, I haven't gotten around to it. I'm a purist. I'm still.

I'm trying to get back to nature. But you haven't just, you haven't just tried what I just said. No. So I've done it with myself because people say it's so awesome. And so I would ask it, let's say a leadership question.

Jocko Willink

And what I've found is it's about, it's pretty good. It's pretty good, but it's not quite there. Like, there's a, there's a certain. What's the uncanny valley that Rogan talks about all the time? How when you see a picture or you see AI generated person on a tv, you're like, it's not quite right.

You know, there's something wrong with it. So the answer is that there's, like, obviously, large language model of me. Me. It's gonna have all my podcasts and it's got all my books, so it's got a lot of my thoughts that it can capture. And what I noticed is it gives a very good answer that definitely sounds like it could be me.

And then there's some little thing that you go, didn't quite nail it, but because it didn't quite nail it, it also is great at giving itself an out. Kind of a caveat. So the end of the answer, it says, and by the way, all leadership situations are different, so this particular approach may not be appropriate for the situation that you're in. So if I asked it, if I asked AI Huberman, if I said, hey, I'm feeling low energy today, what should I do? It would say, well, you want to make sure that you have woken up and gotten some good sunlight in your eyes.

Perhaps do 30 minutes of zone two cardio. It would give me a list of things to do, and then it would say at the end, of course, the human body is a complex organism, and these may not be the right answer. So it gives itself an out. Even after it gives information, it gives itself an out. Amazing.

It's pretty clever. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, my girlfriend's been, like, trying to encourage me to use more of these tools. Right and I'm listening, you know?

Andrew Huberman

I listen, you know, and I'm. And I'm slowly moving up to. To using them because it does sound like it can generate. Also for generating email responses. I'm not the quickest on email.

I'm not the quickest on text message, admittedly. You know what's funny? When text messaging first came out, I remember I was a postdoc at Stanford. It was probably around 2007 that Facebook was cropping up, and I think I had a flip phone. People still had sidekicks back then.

And I remember thinking people were texting. I remember thinking to myself, this is my thought then. This is what you just called. I thought, this is so dumb. This is so dumb.

This is like, people that passed notes in class. Who passed notes in class. I was like, I didn't pass notes in class. If I need to talk to somebody, I'd talk to them. Or I'd wait till after class.

Half the time I wasn't in class. But anyway, that was, go to class, folks. Go to class. Trust me, trying to make up for lost time is very, very hard. Don't do that.

Skateboard after school. Skateboard before school. Do your thing. Go to class. But I remember thinking, this is so stupid and indirect and doesn't make sense.

And it felt like whispering. Like I always, you know, my dad. Cause my dad's old school, you know, this kind of goes back to what we were talking a little bit about before and adopting kind of scripts within your head. My dad's Argentine. Okay.

And he's pretty traditional. I grew up with a lot of, kind of, like, hearing about a lot of traditional stuff. My parents are diametrically opposed politically. They ended up divorced. They're both happily in other things.

Cool. But you internalize some of those scripts. And I remember him telling me when I was a kid, because I had a friend over male friend, and he whispered to me, my dad goes, no, no whispering. You want to say something, you say. And I was like, okay.

I can still remember that. Right? I don't know if that's good or bad. It sounds good. We all love these stories of parents being very clear, right.

But then, you know, sometimes the things we internalize don't serve us well, right. Because what if you can't say it to somebody or it's, like, overwhelms you to try and say it, then, like, do you not say it like that gets you into trouble? That's not good. And so I think, you know, taking these scripts that exist, like these, these, like, if thens they're. They're worth challenging internally.

I'm doing. I'm doing a lot of that lately. I do that kind of, like, yeah, like, what are the scripts in my head? Like, what do I really believe? Believe.

Because especially when you start getting feedback that's so different than the way you know yourself and that the people close to, you know, usually go, like, oh. Like. I mean, I would hate the idea that. That someone would think, like, I was, like, unkind, even, or, you know. Or, you know.

So I think we have to address these scripts, and so I think that we're talking about AI. I think with, is AI gonna have a. Will AI feel proud, guilty, haughty? I don't know. It sounds like it will.

I've asked Harper, this my girl. I've, like, asked her, and she's just like, oh, yeah. No, it has feelings. It hallucinates. Like, it knows.

And it all makes sense to her because she thinks in math. She's math dimensionality. And I'm like, whoa. And it's scary to me. But it's here to stay.

There's no question. It's here to stay. I think we're all gonna have, I'm told, an AI twin, where you'll go, hey, Jacob, or, hey, echo. Like, what do I need to do today? And it's gonna say, yeah, you think you're tired, but you're not tired, or you think you don't need rest, but you need rest.

Like, it will know you based on biometrics better than you know you. Now, that's scary. But then again, that's the kind of therapist I want. Knows me better than I know me. As opposed to me trying to explain things with words.

I mean, you know, I've already tried that. I've already tried to explain myself with words. That didn't go so well. So you were talking about James Hollis, and I know you just went out to interview him, and you actually had sent me a video of him talking about creating a life. It's like an.

Jocko Willink

It's probably an hour and a half long, but it was very interesting to go through that. And, you know, we've kind of touched on some of the stuff that he talks about in that, but we. One of the words that he talked. One of the things that he talks about is your vocation. And he breaks down the etymology of vocation, meaning it's not just your job.

It's what you're actually called to do in life. And then you get the things that society's telling you to do, and your family's telling you to do, and the materialistic is telling you to do, and your ego is telling you. So you got all those things, and they're kind of at war or at odds with this psyche, this. This human spirit that you have. And what he says, which is interesting, is you can't.

You can't outrun the psyche of an unlived life. So if you're not doing what you're truly called to do, that creates problems, that creates issues.

And when you. When you're trying to figure out where you're at, when you're trying to think through, do you think you landed your vocation? Do you think you got it done? Oh, man. Well, first of all, Hollis is amazing.

Andrew Huberman

And we would normally not travel with our studio to interview someone, but he wasn't able to travel. And he said exactly that. He talked about a. You know, he said. He said.

He framed it in an interesting way. He said, you know, he said, I don't think we should immediately applaud people that have a 50 year marriage. And I thought, what? He's been married a very long time. He goes, yeah, because sometimes inside that 50 year marriage, there's a soul death of one or both people.

And as a kid from a divorced home who still would very much like to have a marriage and family, working very hard to make the changes in me that would be required to do that, obviously, that sort of broke my heart. And on the other hand, I said, like, what are you talking about? And he's like, listen, in those moments where we're not in stimulus response, we can hear what our soul wants. That's what the psyche in the soul wants, our expression. And if we don't listen to it, it's the saddest thing of all, because there's no way you can go through life without feeling you lived the right life.

And so for me, I have both a blessing and a curse. The curse is that I can't help it but to do what I believe in. And that's the blessing, too. So when I was a kid, I'll go through this quickly. I loved tropical fish then.

I love birds. I was obsessed. I spent all day, all day, all day at the aquarium store and at the bird store and just logging them in. Eventually, I got these great cheat dwarf parrots, and they shit all over my room and made everyone miserable squawking. And it was a disaster.

And then I hit puberty, and then I fell in love with skateboarding and the stuff peripheral to that. And you know, discovered girls, and, like, it was super exciting. And then punk rock music, and then it was biology and neuroscience and psychology and biopsychology and then run a lab, and those were all. And it was just. I just couldn't and can't stop myself.

That's what I love. It's like, what? I just bask in it. And then when it came to podcasting, it was like, rob Moore, he was going to be my book agent because he does some publicity stuff, but he does the fight with Teddy Atlas podcast. And, like, this guy, I was telling, he's a punk rocker.

He doesn't even know it. He didn't even know what that is. Like, drives a Tesla. He parts his hair. He's like, real good looking guy, and his wife, a real squared away life, everything.

And I'm like, but he's just got this spirit. He runs triathlons, and he's just got this spirit. He's just like, sense. And I was like, let's do a podcast. He's like, okay, we set it up.

It was like, go. There was never a should we do we get Mike Blay back from DC, be the photographer. Bring two guys, Martin foes and Chris Ray from. They have this video production company. They worked for DC.

They're from down here, kind of Orange county guys, skateboarders. Bring them together. Ian Mackie, Stanford media. Like, get all the guys together, do the podcast. Could not stop us.

Couldn't stop ourselves. And we were just all on the plane ride back last night from DC, and everyone's, like, editing and working and doing, and I'm like, this is the best. This is like getting in my friend Jake Rosenberg's Volvo in high school, taking time off with forged signatures. Don't do it. Kids going out to the Reno nationals for skateboarding and just doing it and, you know, and, like.

And having to get someone's credit card. Cause no one was 25, and I don't know what. Someone had a credit card and staying at circus circus and seeing all the craziness, and it was like. And all of that, and just like, we're just doing it. Like, I can't help it.

And so I think that it's. I have. I feel like I'm exactly where I need to be right now. And the hard lessons that come with it. Exactly where I need to be.

This is, like, very much in your guys wheelhouse of, like, extreme ownership and good. It's like, okay, that sucked. That's not how I would want it. That's not how I would have written the story. And also, I've learned something.

And a really smart person told me this, actually, on the way here. He said, you know, like, we'd love to think of our life, our life, excuse me, as a bunch of threads where you can follow it and connect the dots. And people have talked about connecting the dots, blah, blah, blah. Looking back, you're supposed to be able to connect the dots. This was the whole Steve Jobs commencement speech on 2015 at Stanford.

He said, you can't connect the dots going forward. I would argue you also can't connect the dots going backward, because if you spend too much time doing that, you lose sight of the fact that it's actually just a tangled ball of thread. What you have to do is just keep spooling it forward. I mean, I think living in the past is dangerous. You have to reflect on the past.

But I'm thinking, okay, podcasts now get information out in shorter form. We're thinking about how to do that. Maybe use AI to edit podcasts, get them out in shorter form. Think about, like, I love the Olympics. I'm obsessed with track and field.

Go up to Hayward Field in Oregon. Like, I want everyone to watch the track and field at the Olympics. I don't know why this feels so important to me, but, like, I miss some, like, positive stuff about country. Like, these kids are amazing. They're working so hard, and, like, I want to go up there.

I'm hoping cam's gonna join me. We, like, watch them, you know, the Olympics. I love Sesame Street. I think each character on Sesame street is like, cookie monster is dopamine. One cookie.

Like, cookie monsters eyes bounce because Cookie could come from any direction, right? It's like he's just pure dopamine. Oscar the grouch. It's our grouchy circuits, right? Elmo, it's like that, like, sweeter.

Like, it's all neuroscience, and so I'm like, oh, like, we got to like Sesame Street. I don't know. I don't know what's going to come of it. So it's like an energy, and I'm like, I don't know where things are going to evolve, but I want people to understand their biology, their psychology, and learn. And for me, it just kind of explodes through me, and I try and do it with words or podcasting.

So, yeah, I feel like I'm exactly where I need to be, and I can sense the next thing coming. And I spent a lot of time with Rick Rubin. These days. I'm not trying to name drop, but because I just did. He's a really close friend.

We've been spending a lot of time together for a couple years now. Get together, sauna and cold. And I love Rick as a person, as a friend first, but, I mean, he's, like, the essence of, like, learning how to tap into your creative energy and sense what's coming. And he's just somebody who can just, like, wipe the slate clean on. Like, he.

He'll answer questions that I have about Strummer, the Ramones, or whatever. He loves that stuff. But he doesn't really, like talking about the past. He's got all these great stories, but he's just, like, always focused on, like, what's the next creative thing? What's the next.

So I've been trying to think about that a lot. So, yeah, I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be, and. And it's weird because I think that the punishing features of being public facing. Yeah, they suck. But it's like, nothing, nothing, nothing compared to, like, the, like, humbleness, the, like, privilege, and, like, the thing of being able to, like, share what you love with the world and hopefully they benefit.

I mean, that, to me, is, like, the ultimate, when your love can benefit the world. And I see that. Listen what you do. I listen to your podcast with Ferris, with Rogan. Like, I'm a fan.

So for me, like, here, like, I'm also fanning out, hang out with Armstrong. He comes over. He's like, yo, good morning. And I'm like, tim Armstrong's in my house. You know, I listen to him every day of my life.

You know, sit down. He left a guitar at my house, so every once in a while, he'll pick it up, and I'm all. So, yeah, I mean, I. But it wasn't always like that. And I want to be clear, because it all sounds like magic.

There were many years where I was just, like, I felt disconnected. I was disconnected. When I left the skateboarding community, I was very alone. And the academic community, I made eventually great friends there, but I didn't feel the same thing. And then podcasting, it's brought it back.

So I would say to anyone, there are years where you have to go out and alone and kind of lonely. Hopefully not alone alone where it's lonely. Like, finding your people is hard. And I think that's part of the reason why people are online. They're trying to find their crew.

Like, my sister always said, you've always been a pack animal. And I. I'm, like, really crewed. Up these days, men and women. I have female friends, too.

I have female friends, and they're, like, great sources of feedback and fun. And I think that it's one of these things where we sometimes think it all just pops up and you're supposed to just. You have to build these things. And I don't know if anything come through it. The spirit that you guys put out there is like, you can do this.

And it starts with getting your ass out of bed in the morning and doing a workout when you don't want to, and then you go build the next thing, and build the next thing. Like, I think people sometimes forget you have, like, four kids, right? I do have four kids. Married. You.

You steadily marry with four kids, you know? Well, I only have one left. That's, you know, in the. That I'm. That's a dependent, they say.

Yeah. But that. That's a huge accomplishment. Yeah. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

It's awesome. Yeah. And I know you. You're your dad, too. Yes.

Andrew Huberman

Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. And you guys train, and you do it. You know?

I think that we need more examples of this, you know? And. I don't know. So, yeah, I think I'm where I'm supposed to be. But, you know, listen.

Lately, I. Listen. I text you every once in a while and say, should we. Should we do it? Should we run for office?

Listen, there's. There's. There's Rogan Haynes, and then there's, you know, willink Huberman doesn't have the same ring to it. I think it's pretty good. I'll run with you as long as you're president.

Bulldogs grazing on the White House lawn. You realize that we're gonna upset some people by saying this, right? I'm one of them? Very possible. You'd be great.

You'd be great. And I know that's why people keep tapping you for it. I wasn't saying. No. No.

Jocko Willink

Yeah. I really don't like politics, and, you know, my standard answer is, if things get bad enough, of course. But people. People's ideas of what's bad enough. Most people's idea of what's bad enough is not close to what bad enough is, in my book.

Andrew Huberman

Yeah. I think people. I know this conversation is not a pleasant one for you, but I think the reason people bring it up is people feel your steadiness and they feel your integrity, and those are felt things.

Jocko Willink

Well, like I said, hopefully there's not a civil war or some kind of crazy, you know, people. It is bad. They'll tell me, I like you have an iPhone right now and power and food and, like, everything's going good. So as everything's going good, we're on track. I can keep away from that world.

Andrew Huberman

But we don't want you to miss your morning surf, your morning workout, and talk about people, you know, trying to parse your life. I mean, you know that time when you, like, borrowed an extra stick of gum from the kid sitting next to you and didn't give it back? Like, that's coming back to get you, Jacob. Because that person, if they're mad, they won't talk about the stick of gum. They'll say some other, you know, they'll say some other accusation, and you're like, oh, okay, awesome.

Jocko Willink

Who is this? Who the hell's going on? So get wild real quick. I fantasize these days in a real way. I mean, we have, obviously, a big divide.

Andrew Huberman

Someone came up with this name, not me, but I think that there should be a call for a league of reasonable people. Not a tightrope in the middle, you know, but like, a league of reasonable people that explore things issue by issue, that really parse them as carefully as one can in the time allotted and then make the best decision they can for the greatest number of people. And I don't know if that's just a pipe dream, but God willing, like, there will be to emerge out of what's happened, right, right now. A league of reasonable people. But not as long as the Internet is borderline.

It's gonna require some other mode of communication and building. I don't know. I don't have any genius ideas about. I've brushed up against that. But I talked about on our podcast one time, I was like, normal people.

Jocko Willink

Hey, this is the party of normal people. I'm not crazy. I'm not flying off the hand. I'm just a normal person. I have a normal job, and I wanna live a normal life.

And that's, that's most people, by the way, the, the people that comment on the Internet is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of people, and they're not normal. People that are normal are focused on doing a good job at their, at their work, place of work. They're taking care of their kids, they're taking care of their spouse. They're trying to save up for a new car. They're trying to put an addition on their house.

They're trying to save up a down payment. That's normal people. And that's most people. That's most people. And another thing that happens is, oh, you have one idea that I don't like, therefore, I hate you and I hate all your ideas.

And that's what's been very interesting right now, is because you're starting to get all this muddled world where things are starting to come back. And if you go far enough to the left, you actually become right. And if you go far enough to the right, you become left. And so now those people are starting to get confused. And they're looking around.

They don't know what they're protesting about. They don't know whose side they're on. Listen, the solution was. Was given to us years ago in none other than the Ramones. Joey, Johnny, Dede and Tommy, right.

Andrew Huberman

Joey, left, very left wing Democrat. Okay? Johnny stated, self stated, Republican, right wing. They hated each other. Rick validated these stories.

Cause he knew them well. They toured together. They spoke through an intermediary. One guy took. I won't say the direction.

You can watch the documentary. It's awesome. One guy took the other guy's girlfriend and married her, and then she would tour with them, and they all managed to stay in the same van. Now, the drummers turned over all the time, and the best one, of course, was Dee Dee. Cause when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of Fame, you ever see his acceptance?

He gets up there and they're like, one person. So I think. I think Johnny thanked President Reagan and the republican party. I think Joey thanked, I don't know, some left. I think the world or something.

I don't know. Check who Joey. And Dee Dee gets up there and he goes, I thank me. He thanks himself. He thanks himself.

He's just like, he could care less about any of that stuff, right? Sadly, he died of a drug overdose a couple weeks later. But Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy got it. If they could tour in a van together and play music together and even have this interpersonal dynamic together and have an intermediary help them communicate, that's proximity, okay? If they can do that, then I like to think that humans can get along despite diametrically opposed views.

Jocko Willink

Yeah. Talking about the left becoming the right and the right becoming the left. I just was reading a quote from John Lydon, and I can't get it. You know, Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistol, the original. One of the original punk rockers.

And he basically said, it's very strange now that the most punk rock you could be is to be a conservative, because they're the ones that are actually against authoritarian government now. So you get this role reversal. And actually, if you go back and look at California Uber Alice, right by the dead Kennedys. And what's that song about? It's anti authoritarian, but the authoritarian that they're talking about is Governor Jerry Moonbeam Brown.

Andrew Huberman

Is that right? Oh, yeah. I remember when Jello Biafra from the dead Kennedys, he, like, ran for governor. Yeah, he did. He did run.

Jocko Willink

But when you read that song, or you read the lyrics, that song, it's, hey, there's this authoritarian government. Well, the authoritarian government he's talking about is Governor Brown by name. You know, that's what he's saying. You're trying to impose these things on us. And it's really funny.

It's. It's really funny to imagine that he wrote that in 1982 or something like that. And it's. It's talking about basically political correctness in 1982. Like, oh, you're gonna come at me with your suede pants?

He's going off on these freaking tyrannical liberals that are going crazy with the government. And so it's very interesting that you see the way the tides turn and the way things have shifted. It's very bizarre. I actually still have. I have a lot of hope, you.

Andrew Huberman

Know, I have a lot of hope. Because, like I said, I work with companies all over this country, and I work with energy companies, oil companies, financial companies, insurance, every company. And you go and talk to those people, they want to know, hey, how can we help with leadership? How can I do this? How can we do better next quarter?

Jocko Willink

How can we help our customers more? That's what people are thinking about. They're not thinking about what these crazy people online are talking about all the time. So I think eventually some of this stuff will burn out. And I think there's burnout right now.

I think there's a little bit of burnout. It feels like it. On Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, people are like, dude, I mean, how can you consume all that information, really? Like, at the end of the day, how many comments are you going to read when you realize that you're going to be. There's going to be some extreme left.

There's going to be some extreme right. There's going to be a bunch of bell curve, and that's that. And before you go, look, how much time did I spend doing this? If you spent 20 minutes, imagine spending 20 minutes, like, reading comments. And what could you have done in 20 minutes?

Get a guitar and learn to play guitar. If you play guitar for 20 minutes a day, in a year, you're going to be able to play guitar actually. Quite well, or do what Hollis said, sit there, close your eyes, listen to what comes up and resist the temptation to get up and move. And you'll learn something really valuable by taking yourself out of stimulus and response. You'll learn something about who you are and what you want to put into the world.

Andrew Huberman

And, you know, I've only done it once since he suggested doing this this morning, and I was like, wild like this. You know, I couldn't agree more. But this is why, jaco, we want you to run. But. No, I get it.

I understand that the moment you step into the political fray, it's a very different picture.

It's a twelve hour news cycle. It's the whole thing. But I think people do want, they also want to feel trust. They want to feel confidence in who's out there for them. Yeah, we're going to keep pushing.

Jocko Willink

It's going to be an interesting election in 2024. Oh, boy. Yeah. And I think we're rolling towards it right now. I mean, I think that's what people are feeling.

Andrew Huberman

It's kind of like what's going to happen. But, you know, I am still somewhat optimistic. Have to be. Yeah, I mean, late sixties, early seventies, there was, there was people getting murdered. There was bombs all the time, bombings all the time in America.

Jocko Willink

Like, there was a major issues. And we made it through that, obviously, we made it through the civil war. So hopefully we can make it through the 2024 election. I think we'll make it through the election. I think the question is what happens after that?

Andrew Huberman

But listen, I'm not very versed in politics. I have friends on both sides. Like I said, I grew up in a split political home. You know, I've lived in Berkeley, California, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles. Never lived east of interstate five, at least not far east of interstate.

People always laugh. I've been to the east coast, though. Love it. But I think that, yeah, I mean, you don't really know humans, I think, until you have friends from both sides. I mean, I've always had a huge mix of friends with different political leanings and I don't know.

Jocko Willink

You don't hate them now? No, I love people. This is what, so, like, this is the thing. Like, I, it's, my heart is what gets me in trouble because I love people I want to understand. And then I think then, you know, empathy is a weird thing, right?

Andrew Huberman

I'm not saying I'm the most empathic person in the world, certainly not. But I think in order to empathize we actually have to leave ourselves, by definition, than come back and, you know, I think, you know, earlier we were talking about relationships. I think the best advice I ever heard on relationships, I'm really trying to internalize more and more is from Paul Conti, who's been on my podcast. And I think it was on Whitney Cummings podcast. He said, you know, if you had to write down the top 100 things that are important for relationships of all kinds, it's self care communication that just repeat 50 times.

You know, that's some jocko simplicity of directness. That's definitely simple. You know, and I think he's right. And I think that, you know, we don't get taught how to do all that. You want me to make that more right?

Yeah. Self care. I'm not 100% sure, because I'd have to get some kind of definition. But let me tell you about communication. You want to talk about how to help a relationship with communication, 97% of the part of communication that you need to be good at is listening to what the other person, because everybody thinks that good communication means.

Jocko Willink

I'm gonna talk a bunch like, oh, I got a beef with my wife. I'm gonna go talk to her. So I go, we sit down, I talk 97% of the time. I walk away thinking, I had a great conversation. I really proved my point.

My wife's ready to file for divorce. You know what I mean? Like, that's what happens. So if you wanna communicate, well, shut your mouth and listen to what other people say. By the way, that also includes political discussions.

So if you've got some. Some opinion that I don't agree with, I shouldn't try and argue against you. I should listen to what you have to say so I understand where you're coming from. Otherwise, anytime I open my mouth is pointless, because I don't even understand where you're coming from in the first place. So everyone could do a lot better if they shut their mouths and listen more, which is a weird thing for a person that has a podcast to say.

Yes, because I'm sitting here talking. Well, but you're giving valuable information. I think, you know, I think one of the hallmarks, one of the real challenges of being a person, being an adult or a kid, is you have to figure out, well, let me put it differently. I think 50% of having a self is standing your ground around what you know and believe to be right and true. Like, yes, this, know this.

Andrew Huberman

I'm not this. I'm that. You're this. You're that or this was a, not b, and standing your ground. And we placed tremendous value on that.

The other half is hearing what's coming in and going, oh, whoa, okay, maybe, or, whoa, okay, you're right. Okay. And the thing is, we tend to place enormous value on the former, not the latter. But we also have to be careful because we need to be semi permeable to input. We can't take everything that comes our way and say, oh, yeah, you know, you're putting this label on this or me or you or whatever, or them and go, oh, yeah, right.

I mean, you can't be wishy washy. You need to be semi permeable. And the challenge is knowing when to stand your ground and when to take in. And I think. I think that's one of the major challenges of being human.

Jocko Willink

Yeah, I think that people get caught up on a lot of little things that don't matter and stand their ground on a bunch of things that they have no business standing their ground on. And then, and there's a few core beliefs. Like you said, half stand your ground, half be flexible. For me, it's like, let's say there's 100 things that I believe right now. There's like seven of them.

They're not moving seven of them. So that's 7%, not 50%. There's seven things that I believe that, okay, you're not going to be able to change, or it's going to be very, very, very difficult for you to change my mind on these seven things, or five things or whatever that number is. It's a very small number. Everything.

This is, to me, strategic thinking. Right. I think of like, okay, where am I at as a human? There's big giant things. Individual freedom.

Like, I believe that people should have individual freedom. It's gonna be really hard for anyone to convince me that taking away people's freedoms is a good idea. It's gonna be really difficult. Now, are there a million little details in other worlds and other aspects of life that I sort of have a. What is that a softly held belief on?

Sure, but I can change my mind pretty easily about a bunch of stuff. There's probably seven things that I'm like, yeah, I'm not changing my mind on that. Not without some significant, really strong evidence articulated really well, backed up by some kind of historical understanding of the world. Cause most things they're gonna change, they're going to change and they don't matter. And, and that's why I think it's, people tie themselves and actually, that's another thing that, that Hollis talks about, he talks about the fact that these people that are ideologues, ideologues, they're caught.

They, they basically, they lose their soul because they surround themselves with, I'm a left wing person. I'm a right wing person. That's who I am. It's not who you are. That's not who you are.

But wait, hold on. You're gonna tell me that this whole belief system you adopted, the whole thing, like you hit from top to bottom and just said, yep, everything that is left wing or everything that is right wing. I buy it all. Like, who does that? That's crazy.

Who does, who does that? The answer should be no one. Everyone should say, yeah, you know what I don't believe in? What? I don't believe in welfare because I'm so right wing that.

Okay, well, hey, what about this person over here? Who, single mom, she lost her job. She's trying to find a new job, but she can't find one right now and she's got four kids to feed. Do you think you should, she should get nothing? Well, you see what I'm saying?

To just say, oh, I'm an ideologue and this is what I believe and that's it. It's just a dumb place to come from. And yet we do it all the time. And then you throw your opinion out about something, you're gonna get attacked from all different directions. It's been, it's actually, I had Robert F.

Kennedy junior on, that's a. They're having a hard time pinning him down, cuz who, who's gonna, who's gonna vote for him? I'm not sure. Because if you're the most left wing person and the most passionate thing that you're passionate about is the environment, cool. He's your number one vote, but at the same time your anti Israel.

Okay, then you, you, or, sorry, if you're. Yeah, if you're anti Israel, you're not gonna vote for him. So here's, he's, he doesn't make sense to anyone. And they're trying to figure because he doesn't fit in one, one particular view, he's very hard to pin down. And so what is happening to him is he's getting attacked from both sides.

And guess what? I don't agree with that. Everything that guy says at all. Sure. How could you?

How could you? I don't agree with everything that anybody says at all. Cuz I'm a human and I have an open mind about, like I said 96 of the things that I'm thinking right now, I have an open mind about. And I'm ready to, like, say, yeah, you know what? I can see where that makes sense.

And, you know, at least we could try it for a while, and if it starts to backfire, fire, we could pull it back and we can make a different decision. That's okay. So people get really into what they think they know, and you actually don't know anything. And I don't know anything. There's very few things.

I always. I always have a little trick question that I ask when I'm working with a company. I'll say, how often do you think I have to admit that I'm wrong? And people will say, all the time, you know? Cause I talk about humility.

It's important to be humble. And I'll say, so how often do you think I have to admit that I'm wrong? And people say, you probably do it. I say, how many times a week? And people say, probably twelve.

You know, seven. No, no, no. Probably even more than that. They'll have these little arguments amongst the crowd, and then I'll tell them the truth, which is I rarely, almost never have to admit that I'm wrong. And the reason that I rarely, almost never have to admit that I'm wrong is I never go out there and say, hey, I'm 100% right about this.

I don't go out there and say that because I don't believe it. There's very few things that I feel so strongly about that I say, hey, I 100% know this thing that I'm about to say is the truth. Very few things do I feel that way about, so. And yet you can go on the Internet and meet thousands and thousands of people that actually think they know everything 100% better than anybody else. It's very disturbing.

Andrew Huberman

It's super disturbing. I mean, it's super disturbing. And I think that. I mean, we've been talking about politics despite, you know, it always being a third rail topic. I have to believe that people want to be reasonable.

I think that there's so much projection onto, like, who the candidates are that I think we forget who they're supposed to serve and what it means, you know, to be on one side or the other. I'm very bothered to the point of being, like, legitimately concerned. Not enough to run unless you run. I made this joke, actually, at the end of the Time magazine interview. They were like, so what's next?

And I'm thinking to myself, well, I gotta record this episode this week. Like I said, like, 1 mile, one week horizon, rather. But I just. I don't know why I blurted it out. You know, I just said, like, I don't know, maybe I'll run for office.

Like, I think that's when the heat started, actually. I mean, the heat would have come anyway, but that's, like, when some of the heat started. And, you know, I'm not flip about that. I mean, the decision to be, you know, a politician is a serious one, right? I mean, you're making decisions on behalf of millions and millions of people, and.

And there's rarely any recourse for four years or so, so I just. I don't know. I like to think that there's some young girl or guy out there who's, like. Like, I'm gonna get this someday. Like, they're, like, on it.

They want that slot, and they want to do it for the right reasons. That's the whole gonna say. Because most people that have that attitude, you do not want them in charge of anything. Sure. But at least.

Right? I agree. I mean, not for their own ego reasons, but that they really see an opportunity to do better and to serve, you know? And. And it might require, if someone like.

Jocko Willink

That can actually win at this current time, it'd be very difficult for a person with a good heart and a humble attitude to make enough noise to actually move the needle. Be very difficult. Yeah. Well, this country has a history of celebrities running and doing well, so I don't know. Like, is Taylor Swift gonna run?

Andrew Huberman

Just seems like everyone loves her. She's. She certainly has the stamina. That tour schedule. I couldn't tell you one Taylor Swift song.

Sorry. I just. It's not my proclivity, but that tour schedule. You think you were taking heavies before. Oh, I think she's amazing.

I think she's amazing. I just. I just couldn't tell you one. One song. I'm just gonna be quiet.

Over. Am I in trouble now about Tay Tay? Oh, sorry. Okay. No, she's super impressive, but backpedaling.

The tour. The tour schedule. The tour schedule is incredible. It would bury ten people. Somehow she pulls out.

Jocko Willink

I heard there's some workout. Have you heard of this workout where you, like, do her however long her concert is, you do some kind of exercise, like, what she does, and apparently it's quite challenging. Echo Charles. I've never heard of that. Work out okay.

Andrew Huberman

Yeah. Just the mere physical part. Yeah, the physical part of it. Yeah. No, I like some non quote, unquote punk rock stuff.

Jocko Willink

I have some friends that are very into Taylor Swift and Peter Attia. Super into. There you go. We call him swifties. Yeah, swifties, but the mother daughter combo.

But I was talking to the mom, who I'm good friends with, and so it is like she has just nailed relatable emotions and feelings and errors that girls go through and women go through, and she just nailed it. Cause she's been doing it through that in her life. So she's just captured, like, here's what. And so, as a girl grows up into a woman, she can kind of track emotionally what's being felt, and it just. She just nails it, apparently.

Yeah. Apparently, yeah. I mean. I mean, the success of. The success of the tour.

Andrew Huberman

The success of the tour, the enthusiasm, and it seems like the universal love. Right? Like, there are these people who are just universally loved. They're rare. But, I mean, I'm sure she catches flak, but if she does, I'm not aware of any of those stories.

Right. You know, it seems like she's just revered, and it's awesome. I think the. Yeah, the. Just the.

Jocko Willink

Right. The sheer physical stamina, the mental stamina that, you know, obviously, she's got a great team around her, but, like, you can't. You can't just kind of imagine that stuff into existence. So who knows? Maybe she'll run.

Well, she's also an edge, epic songwriter, and that's been proven over and over again. But she taps into, you know, that. That thread of emotion that people have grown up, especially girls and women that they get, and she's nailing it. So props. Props to tay tay.

Echo Charles

I don't know. Taylor. Taylor Swift? Yeah. Is that her name?

Jocko Willink

I don't know. I just kind of thought, hey, I apologize. Uh, there's. There's something you were talking about when you were. Okay, so before you had the podcast, you were kind of a normal dude.

Andrew Huberman

Out there, still riding, still normal ish. You. Well, your life was more normal. My life was definitely more normal. It was me and the girlfriend and the dogs, and.

And I still worked out. Read all that. There's something that Hollis talks about, and it's authority. And if you're living your life for authority, for an external. So authority is something that's external, and it's usually.

Jocko Willink

It's large and external. That's the way he describes it. So this is when you're living your life to. For. In your case, academia, right.

You're living your life according to this external authority. Also according to the external authority of. You've got to pay rent, you've got to pay taxes. Like, there's a bunch of external things that you're. You're living your life for.

And then you kind of found your vocation, I would say, in being able to teach a bunch of people kind of wide and deep and broad, millions of people, that's pretty awesome. When you think of someone that's trapped or they're. And what he says is, if you're serving these external authorities, it's at some point, look, they can be aligned. Right now, I'd say they're pretty aligned for you. You happen to be able to serve kind of both masters, both the external things and your own internal.

Did you stumble into that? Because it kind of seems like you stumbled into it. Yeah. So I. The.

Andrew Huberman

I've been cursing a bit more than usual during today's podcast, forgive me, we'll need a explicit lyrics warning, which, by the way, parents that made every kid want to buy it more. That's true. Yeah. And that's like, when they put those warnings on podcast episodes. What was her name?

Tipper Gore. Tipper Gore, yeah, Tipper Gore, once again, like, she was the authoritarian figure that was trying to stop free speech in music. Right. And that was Tipper. That was Al Gore's, you know, wife.

Jocko Willink

So that's kind of interesting. Yeah. So remind me of the question again. Sorry, I took us off. So you kind of like.

Andrew Huberman

Oh, yeah. Did I? Yeah. So. Oh, I was about to swear.

I'll try not to swear. So I became a scientist on purpose. I became a podcast kind of podcaster, kind of on accident in the sense. I really wanted to get the information out to a broader range of people. And Instagram was limiting.

I still use Instagram quite a bit as a platform, but podcasts just made sense. In some ways, though, it was long before that I started teaching. So when I was a kid, I would go to these fish stores, and I was obsessed with fish and birds, as I mentioned before, as a real nerd. Like, a real nerd. And I would even come into class on Monday sometimes and, like, ask if I could give a lecture about what I learned over the weekend.

I did one on medieval weapons. I was obsessed with catapults. It's like the cool. And I was obsessed with fish and that kind of thing. And I was at a carnival with my mom when I was a kid, and they had the little fish.

They had the little bowls with goldfish in them, and you'd throw the ping pong ball. And if you got the ping pong ball, and you'd get it. And I was there, and I saw people doing this, and I was just mortified because they'd take the fish home, and I knew that those fish were going to die if the water wasn't dechlorinated. So my mom, who's like a real do gooder, you know, really like my mom, just as like a 1 second aside, was the kind of person where when we grew up, there was a homeless guy in our town. They called him the sheep man because he wore these sheep skins even on really hot days.

Like years later, I found out not him, but she would put homeless people, she would get them hotel rooms and just pay, like, you know, like she's that kind of person. And so I told her about the declar. She was mortified that the fish would die. And so we went and bought a bunch of declor, and I would then go to these things and I would give you a bottle of dechlor to dechlorinate the water when you won your fish, but there was a cost, and you had to listen to me talk to you about dechlorinating and taking care of fish. So it kind of started early on, like there was a purpose and I couldn't help myself.

And who knows? I have a little bit of a grunting tick that takes over if I'm tired. And when I was a kid, I had a little bit of a thing, and my dad used to say, hey, used to squeeze my hand. We were in DC once on a family trip, and stop this. And I used to hide in the closet.

It was a little bit of probably like early Tourette's, kind of like. And it would give a lot of relief eventually past. A lot of young people have this. It's more prominent in boys. And then as the frontal brain circuitry develops, it suppresses it, because basically that's what the frontal brain does, is suppress these reflexes.

So fortunately, they didn't, like, throw me on medication. There wasn't even medication for it back then. But in any case, for me to get out what I feel inside, or for me skateboarding and falling and slamming, I'd feel like. Or boxing, not a sport I was any good at. Or that I recommend if you want to keep your brain unless you're a professional.

Great sport. I love it as a spectator, but I remember I'd get hit sometimes, like, oh, I can think clearly now, you know, just kind of like shake off the cobwebs or like a good hard slam skateboarding. Like, ah, now the day starts, you know, you know, there's something to it. But actually, that's a reminder. Earlier, you asked me about the difference between, was it OCD?

And this would be appropriate time because Tourette's has a little bit of a OCD ish component to it. You asked about OCD versus neurotic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause I was the same kid who would organize his stuffed animals all in a row. I'd have him perfect, wake up in the morning, get them all in a row, and feel like it'd go about my day.

The difference is, with true obsessive components, compulsive disorder. Well, the obsessions are mental, obviously. The compulsions are the action. The engagement in the compulsion doesn't, sadly, doesn't serve to reduce the obsession. It just exacerbates it.

So, like a hand washing compulsion, like, it's not like you're like, oh, like, I'm obsessing about washing my hands. I wash them. I feel some relief. It's. You wash them, and then it somehow trips a reward circuit or something.

We don't really know yet. That then makes you want to. To do it more. So it's like an upward spiral or downward spiral, depending on how you think about it, of that, the behavior makes the obsession worse, not better. It's a dreadfully difficult thing for people, but there are decent medications now that can help and some behavioral stuff and some medication based stuff, and that's OCD.

Echo Charles

And then is it a spectrum, essentially? Like, some people have it worse than others? Let me ask you this, okay? So when I was young, I used. To count the steps, you know, when.

I want to go upstairs, and it'd always be by seven. I don't know why I always felt. Like I had to do that. Like Joey Ramon. Joey Ramon had OCD.

Andrew Huberman

He would go up and down the stairs. He'd have to count seven. They were always late to tour. To tour spots. This is, like, discussed in the documentary.

Echo Charles

Oh, for. So wait, what do you mean by seven? Yeah, so I wouldn't go up and down. Exactly. Right.

And then I'd feel kind of off put. If it will. If. If they didn't land on seven, did. You feel like something bad was gonna happen?

Yeah. Nothing specific, but something bad. Exactly. Right. And so I had in high school, or might have been junior.

Yeah, high school time. I remember skipping some stairs so the seven would land perfect at certain places. You know. You know, it's not totally uncommon. It's actually really good that you're talking about this, because a lot of people have these internal obsessions and knock on wood compulsions and things like step on a crack, break your mother's back, that kind of thing.

Andrew Huberman

Like, you hear that in childhood, and you're like, ugh. You know? And, like, it's. When it starts to diminish life that it can become problematic, but. And it can get out of control.

Actually, there's a guy at Harvard who does beautiful work on motor patterns. His name is Ben Solevsky, mispronouncing last name, hungarian guy. And he shows these videos of these rats learning to press levers and turn on lights and stuff in a cage in order to access a reward. So you see the rats, and they're, like, pressing. It's random.

And then they go, they get the reward. Then they try and reconstruct what they did. And then over time, you see these rats get wicked fast at doing this. And you see they're hitting the levers in the right thing. They're turning on the light and off the light, and then they get the thing.

But they also are introducing these other behaviors, like picking up the leg and doing a little circle over here that has nothing to do with the actual requirements to get the reward. And now, think about baseball pitchers. They have this whole elaborate repertoire of things that they do every single time, very few of which are actually involved in the throwing of the ball. It's just we develop these kind of. These are behavioral superstitions, and they become these fixed action patterns.

We have a lot of these. There's some nice studies done. I think it was at Caltech, where they put video cameras on the parking lot, and they looked at people's where they parked their trajectories getting in and out of the car, and then they put lines over it like they were a rat in an experiment. These are humans, and then they just show, like, six months of behavioral data, and people are just like robots. Robots with respect to, like, the trajectories they take through the parking lot.

They might pause every once in a while and say hi to somebody. We get into these fixed action patterns. So a lot of what we do is subconscious that way. But I would say unless it becomes a problem, you know, then it's. Then it's probably okay if the best thing to do to get over that is actually literally to do what we're doing here.

It's like to talk about with somebody, like, if you think you're crazy because you do this, you talk to someone like, yeah, I kind of do that, too. Yeah, yeah. So that. So you and that's what it. It always felt that way to me.

Echo Charles

Like it was a superstition when I'd stop and think about it. Not necessarily that there's something up with my brain or nothing like that. I didn't. I don't think I know what, knew what OCD was at the time, but, um, yeah, when you talk about it, it's kind of like, oh, wait, why do I believe that? And then you connect the dots, but then you still feel that it's working.

Andrew Huberman

Yeah, it's working. And listen, I have some superstitions. I'm a logical person, but I have some superstitions. And the one. The one thing you can do is just challenge it.

Like, if you really want to break it, it's just like classic, you know, behavioral desensitization. You just. You get. You count to five, not seven, or you just say, no, not today. And then, you know, hopefully you don't get into a car accident.

That's the problem, is that oftentimes people are tense, and then things happen, I think, or you stay busy with other things. The mind wants to be occupied, I think it really does. And some people have a greater kind of hunger for thinking than others. This is that underlying tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick thing. This is why I think doing is so valuable, is why I think I'm trying to get to the 430 program, starting to get up earlier and earlier.

Because getting into a mode of forward, center of mass forward action, I think, does set you into a mode of doing rather than ruminating. I mean, there is something really deadly to the mind about scrolling in bed, in the dark, not just for the lack of sunlight, all the things you miss out on, but it does something. I don't know what it is, but it ain't good. My mind can scroll with no screen. I mean, my mind will just be scrolling, thinking about stuff my wife has been doing, doing this, which she's been super stoked on, falling asleep.

Jocko Willink

Now, look, let's be. I'll be real honest, just between us, my wife doesn't have a lot of trouble falling asleep. This girl can sleep. She can put it down. She's great.

Yeah, she's great. But she told me the other day she's been doing this thing where you count down from 20, you count each breath, and if you mess it up, then you start again at 20. And it was. So I tried it, and I'm like, getting down to. Down to one and then just having to restart the thing again.

Andrew Huberman

Of course you are. Or I'm just or I'm just making it to 19. I'm, like, 20, and then I'm, like, thinking about. Go back, think about something else, so I kind of can get in. It's.

Jocko Willink

It's not fun. It's not fun to. To do mental scrolling. It feels like a rollercoaster. So for me, if I'm, like, trying to fall asleep and you are just.

It's like I'm going from one thought to another thought to another thought to another thought, and I feel like I'm on a roller coaster in my head. But the reason I thought of this is cause you said your mind likes to be occupied. Well, what my wife had read was, you need to make your mind think about a specific thing, and it's easier for it to let go and fall asleep. That's why when a little kid, remember this, count sheep, whatever. Remember this little myth your parents told you?

It's actually kind of true. Yeah. A lot of falling asleep is. Is stopping to pay attention to your body position. It's about kind of just going into your mind, and then your thoughts become fractured, and then you fall asleep.

Andrew Huberman

We've put out these scripts. I put them out on audio and video. This I call non sleep deep rest, which is just my. And people will say, well, that's yoga nidra. Yoga Nidra has intentions and things.

Non sleepy deep rest is like a body scan, long exhale, breathing, and some other stuff. And. And we put them out as audio scripts because a lot of people don't want to look at YouTube or something. Yeah. But in any case, the ten minute and 20 minutes, one, and they let you really, they teach you to move away from thinking and doing to being and feeling.

Now, that's about not sleeping. That's about staying awake while perfectly still. I'm really interested in this state of mind that is as being completely still with the mind, actively alert, mostly because Carl Dyseroth, who has a podcast, who was on my podcast, who's, like, probably one of the best neuroscientists that ever lived, bioengineer. He's also a psychiatrist. He's got five kids.

He's a hyper functional guy, said that his practice every night after his kids went to sleep. Now they're older, they put themselves to sleep, to sit in a chair and to close his eyes and deliberately think in full sentences, complete sentences. And then Rick Rubin, who I spend again, a fair amount of time with, oftentimes will go into, like, lying down or seated position. Just kind of like, keep but mind very active thinking while still, he's also big on walking and that kind of thing. It's interesting how Rick has kind of come to embody like the mystique of creativity.

You know, there's so much mystique around seal teams and around spec ops because it's like, how do they do what they do? And it's like, well, they're not really going to tell you, but you can keep wondering. But that's mystique. That's what's cool. I remember the old commercials for it, like footsteps on the beach, then they disappear.

That was the coolest one, the coolest commercial. I don't know how it did with recruiting, but it was a cool commercial. And then with Rick, it's sort of like, how does this guy access this? And I think he has his own protocols. He's not like just haphazard about it.

He spends time in the sun walking. He's talked about some of this, you know, still, while thinking. Dice Roth does that too. Einstein was known for that. Walking, then stopping, closing his eyes and thinking.

So, saying about body still, mind active. That seems like it's a good, good place to be. Yeah, you gotta. Gotta get control of that brain sometimes, man. And I.

Jocko Willink

I'll be the first one to tell you, like, sometimes mine, I like to be really tired at the end of the day. Yeah, you mentioned that when you came on my pocket. Yeah. Like, if I'm like, if I get to train hard, man, I feel so good. I've just go to sleep.

I just. My head hits the pillow, I'm out. Did you roll this morning? I did not roll this morning. But you train this morning?

Yeah, definitely. But like yesterday, freaking had really good workout, really good training. And like, I just fall asleep in a millisecond. Like your head hits a pillow. But if there's.

If you don't get. If I don't get that. That physical, like, let it out, get it out, then it's going to be. Then my mind can start thinking about things. And also if my mind start thinking about things, even if I'm kind of tired, but if there's something going on in my brain, it's like, yeah, that'll, that'll, that'll tick many hours away.

Andrew Huberman

Earlier you asked me whether or not I feel like I'm in the right groove. My career. I was rude. I didn't ask you. Like, like you've been at this a while.

A little while now. How long you've had the podcast? Since 2008. Yeah. Okay.

It's good. Good. Not 15 years and you have the other stuff dialed. Your kids are mostly out of the house except one. You happily married.

You got great businesses. Like, are you thinking specific evolution? I know you have the show or the movie. The. Yeah, the warrior kid.

Yeah. Yeah. He didn't ask me to plug this, folks. I'm actually just interested in stuff. There's.

Echo Charles

There's no. See, wait. Earlier, before we started, we were talking about how, like, there are all these theories about how podcasters have these, like, secret commercial relationships. So we won't talk about. But, like.

Andrew Huberman

Cause we don't want to, like, exacerbate the conspiracy theory, but which we kind of. Which we just did even more by. Saying, listen on it. But. But this is cool.

You mentioned this the other day, and I'm excited, and I retweeted about it, re xed about it. Way of the warrior kid is gonna be a movie. Yep. Movie. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

Awesome. With Chris Pratt. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's.

Andrew Huberman

He was in zero Dark 30. He was in zero Dark 30, and he was in terminal list, and he was in a bunch of other stuff. I mean, he's Star Lord, Jurassic park. Like, he's very popular. Yeah, he's popular.

Jocko Willink

He's. Yeah, he's great, too. Super, super cool. Super stoked. And, you know, that.

Andrew Huberman

That. That is. That. That book. I've gotten such the best feedback of everything I've done in my life.

Jocko Willink

The letters and emails and handwritten notes from kids and from parents that did their first pull up, got an a on the math test, memorized the presidents, like, all the things that are in that book that are going to help them so many different ways. Nothing more gratifying and feels better than helping out all these people and also giving kids a framework. You know, there's a. One of the messages in the book is, like, you need a code to live by. It's everything I just talked about.

Oh, there's a couple things that I. There's a few things that these aren't going to change. That's like, the code you have as a human. And part of that book is the kid writes his own warrior kid code. And once you have a code that you live by, it really can give you some direction in which way you're going to go, and it's going to let you make so many decisions that's going to point you in the right direction, lead you to a better path.

So to have that opportunity and. And actually, the guy that I had. I have. I probably had four or five people reach out to me over the years that wanted to turn it into a movie. Finally, this guy named Ben Everard, he reached out to me, and what had happened to him was he walked into his kid's room in the morning, you know, eleven year old kid, and the kid was doing push ups, and he says, what are you doing?

He's like, I'm gonna be a warrior kid. What's that? Shows him the book, and he's a movie producer. And he said, oh, my gosh, if this book can have this impact on my kid, what is it? So he reads it.

He's like, we got to turn this into a movie. So that was kind of what got the ball rolling this time. Eventually got the screenplay written by a really good screenwriter, which is a totally different skill set. I've been joking about this a lot. My initial thought was, oh, we need a screenplay.

I was like, well, obviously, I'll just write a screenplay. Obviously, I wrote the book. Who could do a better job than me? But it's a different skill set. And what I would have done is I would have taken the books and turned them into the movie.

There's like one for one transfer, you know, it would have just been like that. But movies are different than books. They land different. They. It's.

It's audio, it's visual. A book is a book. You're very. It's very. It's.

It's personal. Right. So, got this great screenwriter named Will Staples, and he just took this book and turned it into an awesome screenplay. And eventually, chris Pratt, we were working on some other things with Chris Pratt, Origin USA, and Jaco Fuel. And he's been using jockofuel for a long time, and he's a patriotic guy.

He supports Origin USA, and so we were talking about doing things, partners, partnerships on that end, and he ended up getting a copy of the script and read. It was like, I want to do this. And so just very fortunate. And he's a great guy, and we got a great team. There's a guy named Mick G.

Who's an awesome director. So, yeah, we've had a. We're. It's awesome, man. It's awesome and it's good.

It's gonna. It's going to help a lot of parents and kids get on the right path in life and learn about hard work, and learn about discipline, and learn about respect, and learn about empathy and learn about how to learn. It's. I'm very, very lucky, very happy, very blessed to be in this situation and super stoked as well. So stoked for you.

Andrew Huberman

I can't wait to see it. Yeah. And it's one of those things, you know, you're asking, so, am I in the right place? I mean, basically, am I in the right vocation? I guess so.

Jocko Willink

My ultimate vocation was being in the SEal teams. Like, to me, that's gonna be the only thing that I will look at and go, yeah, that's kind of what I was supposed to do, and I was very lucky. I got to do it, and I got to do it for 20 years, had awesome experiences, worked with awesome people, and so now everything else is just pure bonus. It's. It's pure bonus.

It's. It's awesome. And trying to take some of those lessons that I learned in the seal teams, obviously, and pass them on, the leadership lessons, especially. But, you know, I took those lessons and tried to give them to my kids. That's why I wrote those books.

So I was. I'll continue to do that. But is doing a podcast as fun as. As it is to go, you know, out to the desert training facility and run and gun? Nope, it's not.

It's just not. Sorry, Echo. Charles, you're cool and everything, like, hanging out with you. Thank you. But I'd rather be shooting a machine gun.

Echo Charles

I understand. I mean, that's a pretty unique and peak set of experiences, you know, knowing a fair number of people who are in the team. So it's like, you guys obviously enjoyed something really special. Yeah. Best job ever.

Jocko Willink

Best. Best job ever. And it's weird. I've kind of. I've kind of gone through a little transition where I used to never tell anyone to join because the chances are you're not gonna make it, which is a terrible thing.

And so when someone says, oh, I'm thinking about going the seal teams, I'd be like, yeah, you should maybe check out the Marine Corps, maybe check out the army. You know, go do something else, because there's a. At least an 80% chance that you're not gonna make it. And, of course, no one thinks that they're that person. Right.

Every person that shows up to seal training thinks that they're the one that's going to make it, and 80% of them aren't. And when you take that to, like, they haven't even joined yet. Now, it's probably 96% of the people that joined the Navy to be a seal. Most of them don't even get there in the first place, so it's a very small percentage. And I got into a habit of telling people, yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's a good job, but it's difficult.

There's drawbacks. I kind of am now at a point where, dude, it's the best job ever. It's the best job ever. You work with awesome guys if you want to do that kind of stuff. I don't understand what else you would could do with your life.

So if you want to shoot machine guns, you want to blow things up, and most important, you're willing to risk your life and you're going to have to kill people, and you. And you could get killed, which is the huge piece of it. Like, oh, oh, I want to be a seal because I want to live in Coronado and I want to freaking run on the beach. Like, all that means nothing if you. What you're doing, what your job is to kill people and put your life on the line for your friends and for your country.

That's what it is. So if you have that thought in your mind, best job ever. If you have any other little thought in your mind, like, well, I want to do it. And there's some little thing, like, it would be cool, but anything, like any. But in there, it's the worst decision you can make, but if that's really what you want to do.

Best job ever. I had the best time ever. Me and my friends, friends for life. Best time. Doing the best job.

Like, it's awesome. So you can't do that forever. Can't have that job forever. And it's. And when I got to 20 years, I looked at my family and I was like, you know, like, I've been gone a lot.

My kids barely knew me, you know, I tell us. My first deployment to Iraq, when I left, my son couldn't crawl. When I got back, he's walking around. My second deployment to Iraq, I got home and my son could swim. Someone other person was actually a navy lifeguard, taught him how to swim.

So I'm a waterman, I'm a surfer, I'm a frog man. And someone else taught my son how to swim. That's jacked up. You know, you want to talk about missing out on life events and then, you know, throw my daughters into that as well. What did I miss from them?

All kinds of stuff. So I got to 20 years and I thought to myself, well, I. I'm gonna go in. And it was a bummer because it was a hard decision to make. I had a freaking ridiculously awesome career.

I was in a great spot. I was, you know, screened for x. I was like, screened for exo deep select. Like, I was. I was in a great spot.

My career was awesome. You got to op a lot. Yeah, yeah. And I was past. My days of operating were coming to an end.

They were kind of over. Like, you know, you get to that level of seniority, you're not going to get to operate. That's why. That's why in the SEAL teams, there's a lot of guys that get out at that twelve to 14 year mark. Actually, 14, they're going to hang on.

But ten to 1213 years, guys are like. They're looking at their future and they think, oh, well, I came in the job to be a commando, and now I'm going to be. Not a command. I'll be helping the commandos, I'll be supporting them, but I'm not going to be doing that job anymore. That's what a lot of guys, they don't.

They don't have that same affection for the job at that juncture. For me, it wasn't really that. It was more. It was just staring at a bunch of deployments in. In the immediate future.

And, you know, my kids were just about going into high school, and, you know, you start talking about wrestling tournaments and jiu jitsu tournaments, and you're just gonna look, you're just gonna. You're not gonna see any of it. That's what's happening. And that's why guys that do 20 years, 25 years, 30, I got friends that have done 40 years in the teams, 40 years in the teams. What they call them bullfrogs.

If. If you're. If you're the. If you're the person with the lowest class number on active duty, yes, you. This is one.

You're the Bullfrog. And there's one at a time. And that person, you know, usually will have around 40 years. That's how long being on active duty. So, yeah, that bullfrog position is hard earned and huge sacrifice.

You know, like, families are. Are not going to be seen very much. And the teams comes first. It always does. So you're committing to that life.

And I did, man. And the teams came first for me, 100%. You can ask anyone in my family, like, what was the number one. What was the number one priority when Jocko was in the teams? They'll tell you without question what the number one priority was.

That's not balanced. Maybe if I was more balanced, if I would have been more balanced, maybe I would have been more open to staying in longer. If I would have figured out a way like, oh, yeah, I can. I don't have to be 100% focused on the teams or, or 97% focused on the teams and 3% of my family, but I wasn't going to miss a training evolution for anything. So, yeah, that's.

Andrew Huberman

At a. At a certain point, that ride is gonna come to an end. That's exactly what, you know, I had to make that decision this freakin rough. And especially. Cause I was expected to carry on, you know, and for me to go and tell, you know, I had worked for the admiral, for me to go tell the admiral what I was doing was.

Jocko Willink

Was a tough conversation, you know, and to tell my immediate boss, who was the commodore at the time, to tell him, hey, here's what I'm doing. And it's rough. And there's a whole. And unfortunately, there was a whole bunch of guys that got out around that same time, and so it wasn't good for the community at large. It was rough.

It was rough. But you did it on your terms. They didn't tell you you need to go. You didn't get injured. No, it was time.

Andrew Huberman

Like, you decided it was time. And there's something beautiful to that, right? That's that sense of agency. Well, I don't know, because if I don't think that I wanted that, that was harder. If I would have been injured and been like, sorry, guys, or been a screw up and been like, yeah, I guess I can't.

Jocko Willink

But it wasn't like that. It was 100% on me to look at my friends, my brothers, and be like, mmm, I'm quitting. It's quitting. You're. I'm gonna quit.

And. Cause that's what you're doing. And you go your entire career in the seal teams. It's like I talked about earlier, it's like, we're not quitting. We're gonna carry on.

We're not complaining. Like, you don't complain. You don't complain when you miss your kids learning how to swim. No one in the teams knew that my kid. No one.

No one. No one knew that. No one knew that my kids, you know, went to the. Had the recital, did this star in the, in the school play. I didn't see any of that.

Where was I? I was at work. Didn't tell what you. No one in the teams tells anybody. You.

You eat it and you carry on and. And that's what I did. And I did it cuz I love the teams. I mean, I wouldn't do anything else. It's freaky.

The best job ever. And the guys are awesome and do anything for them. And so when you get to. To the end of that, so for me, that vocation, it was 100%. I was 100% aligned.

I was 100% aligned. The pull that I started to get was, hey, hold on a second. What about these freaking four children that you created and that you have not been paying attention to? How's that feel? Doesn't feel good.

Doesn't feel good. The other team. Yeah, the other team. And so that's why I made that decision. And then from there, the other stuff kind of happened, like you said, and I joke about this, so you said, there's no diabolical plan.

I didn't have a plan for any of this. For any of this. It was like, oh, well, there was a guy that asked me to come and talk to his executive about leadership. I was like, okay, well, I can do that. And then he said, can you come talk to all my divisions?

And I said, okay, I guess. So he started paying me money. It's like, okay, cool. And then the, the owner of that company, I want you to come talk to all my CEO's of all the companies I own. And he owned 45, 50.

So it was just. So then I have a new job, basically teaching about leadership. And then I need some help. Call my friend Leif. Hey, Leif, need help?

You in? Hell, yeah. Let's go. Now people are asking us, do you have this stuff written down? End up writing the book.

First book, extreme ownership. I. I thought extreme ownership would be like, I'll give it away at the back of an event. Like for free. Did a lot better than that.

Yeah, did a lot better than that. Didn't expect it. I didn't see how well it would translate to the. To the world. I mean, even the title is extreme ownership.

What does that mean? It means taking responsibility for your actions. That's what it means. That's something you learned in second grade. That's something I learned.

You know, the teacher told you in fifth grade, you, you need to be accountable for what you do. You need to be responsible. That's extreme ownership. But people realize that that's what they need in their world. So then, as that's coming out of a seal, friend of mine told Peter Attia to tell Tim Ferriss, dude, you should have this guy on the podcast.

Andrew Huberman

I still remember in my mind the photo of you. Was it like the scariest Navy. Yeah, he click baited that stuff. Good job, Tim Ferriss. Like the most clickbait title I was in my apartment.

It was Keegan Myers apartment off high street in Oakland. I remember where I was standing in the kitchen. I saw it, and I just go, like. I was like, yeah, if you were gonna, like, draw a Navy Seal. I'd been living in San Diego prior.

Right. You guys used to come over and take over bars. Yeah. Like, I have good friends in the teams community, so I can joke about this. And I spoke at a veteran solutions event, Marcus Capone and Amber Capone's veteran solution event, Coronado and Veterans day, and roomful seals.

And I said, same thing. I used to. I don't drink much. Never really did. But these days, I don't drink at all.

But I'd go into bars, hang out, whatever. You guys would show up. I was like, okay, nights over, let's just leave. Like, it's over. It's over.

Like, they're taking over. Let's go, you guys. Yeah, it was San Diego. Good spot for you guys. Yeah, but it's great.

Yeah. But the point is, I think that it's such. It's a great community. I could see how it would create that peak thing. It's also.

Listen, you also. You're alive, you know? I mean, not telling you anything you don't already know. You're alive. So four kids missing.

The swim instruction thing is socks. I feel you on that. Not being able to be there for any of it, you know, you clearly did the math, and the other team seems to be thriving. Yeah, the other team's great. And, you know, my wife, God bless her, she just held down the fort like a boss and never complained about anything and just gave, you know, she just covered all the homefront.

Jocko Willink

I'm talking three kids in maybe four years. The first three kids were, like, in four? Yeah, like, in four years, she got screaming kids. My wife, I remember, she's very bad. Morning sickness.

Her morning sickness would be 24 hours a day for the first trimester of births. And I remember we had. She's pregnant with my son and my other daughter. So, like, one's four and one's two or three, and my wife is, like, standing over the toilet throwing up, and she's such a awesome, sweet, good woman. She's looking at my daughters, and she's telling them she's sorry, and I'm like, I'm standing there.

I'm a total idiot, right? I'm just like, there's nothing you can do. Your wife's just throwing up. Your daughters, as I mentioned, they don't know. I'm not around enough for me to be like, hey, come with me.

They're one of. Be their mom. I'm the random dude that shows up every three weeks with, like, laundry and. But there's my wife just holding down the fort and saying, like, I'm. I'm sorry.

She's apologizing to my daughters that they have to see her like this. I'm like, bro, this is rough talk about a warrior. Yeah. So she was holding down the fort. And then when I eventually, you know, retired, and so now I go into leadership teaching.

And then going back to Tim Ferriss was Tim Ferriss has me on his podcast. And again at, you know, there wasn't that many podcasts then. There was a very small number of podcast. 2013, 2014. It was 2015.

I was 24. Okay. Yep. So 2015, that podcast come out, and then Rogan hears it. I go on Rogan's podcast and both them told me, like, start a podcast.

And I'm like, okay, so start a podcast. Yeah, and start a Twitter account, too. And Ferris lied to me. He's like, he's like, just started. I'll help you.

He never helped me, but, you know, he did help me by telling me to start it. He's like, don't worry, I'll show you how to do. That's a pretty amazing team to. And so when the pod. When my podcast come out, came out again, what am I talking about?

I'm talking about the stuff as to reference what you talked about earlier. I'm talking about the stuff that's coming from my heart, who I am, what I care about, what I like to talk about. What do I like to talk about? War, leadership, discipline. Like, those are things that I talk about.

And that's what we were talking about. And, you know, speaking of, like, highly produced podcasts, because we haven't really changed very much. And someone asked me like, hey, are you going to do. Are you ever thinking about, you know, maybe putting a background in this kind of stuff? And I was like, oh, you remember that disco song that AC DC wrote?

And I'm like, no. And I go, that. Cuz that's not AC DC. You know, and I'm not a disco. I'm not gonna make a disco album.

We're making what we make. Like, still, what I really like doing is I actually really like reading books that are written by first person accounts or written first person person accounts of war. That's what I like. Why? Because it teaches you about human nature.

You get to understand people better when you see them in very terrible situations. And how they get through them and what they do and how the other people react around them. That's one of my methodologies for learning and becoming better. So that's how all this started. And, and then it's just applying sort of the mentality of the DIY punk rock mentality.

Oh, well, I drink tea. Okay, well, people are asking me, what kind of tea do you drink? Because I talked about on Tim Ferriss podcast, I was like, well, there's these few different brands, but why not? I could just make my own. I love the white pomegranate tea.

Andrew Huberman

Yeah, yeah. So there you go. Made my own. And I wasn't paid to say that. I just happen to like it.

I like until I. But I think, I think I made 10,000 thousand tins, the first run. Made 10,000 tins. Put them on Amazon and they were gone in like, whatever it was nine days. And I'm like, yo, so that's kind of where it started.

Jocko Willink

Okay, well, people want good products. Boom. Started making and that's kind of how this stuff started and that's where I ended up. So what does that have to do with my vocation? To me, the vocation is ultimately trying to help people and trying to help people with whatever they're doing and whether it's.

And look, if you interact with other human beings, you're in a leadership position and you probably need help doing it. Most people, leadership is not a natural thing. Leadership is not any more natural than skateboarding, in other words. Yeah, there's, one of your buddies was a little bit naturally better than you, and you're a little bit naturally worse, but neither one of you was born with the ability to do a kick flip. It doesn't exist.

You have to learn it. He got to learn a little bit better. He had a little bit better coordination, maybe he had a little bit better build for it. He had better muscle fiber recognition, whatever the case may be. And so he's.

But he didn't know how to do a kick flip when he was born. And people don't know how to lead when they're born. They might have some natural attributes that make it a little bit easier for them. Maybe they're articulate, maybe they're able to break things down. Well, maybe they're able to simplify things.

Maybe they're a little bit better at understanding what emotions other people are having. And all those things are gonna be beneficial. But you still need to learn how to do the kickflip. You still need to learn how to lead and so, for me, that's kind of the essence of it. How can I help people out?

Well, started with leadership. How can I help them with that? Turned into, like, how can I help you get in better physical condition? Turned into, oh, you got kids? Let's help those kids out as well.

And so that's what it really boils down to me, and that's where the most gratification comes from, is being able to help people out. So, one, the fact that it's an expression from your heart comes through, like, people that. Again, it's a felt thing. I don't think any of us, podcaster, non podcaster, athlete, academic, poet, writer, whatever, can get any degree of success without, like, really touching into, like, what. What comes from the heart.

Andrew Huberman

And I think this is what Hollis is talking about when you have to listen to that call from your soul, your psyche. I think some people, he says it's an irrational calling. An irrational call. An irrational calling, which is important to remember. Yeah, I love that you.

That you remind that. And also, he several times reminded me that the people who do it, the people who, like, really step into their expression, are gonna suffer. You wish they didn't have to. You wish it was just all reward. There are rewards, certainly, but that they're suffering, and that's part of the reason people resonate with it.

Like, again, you know, we talk about Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, you know, anyone, like, you know, pick your favorite musician. Like, you have to imagine that the. Because of the amount of emotion they put into it, there's zero minus one chance that it's all rosy. It has to involve suffering. And I think.

And I think that's one of the reasons we revere these people. And, I mean, you're highly revered. And, you know, that might be weird for me to, you know, to sit across from me and to hear me say that, but the truth is, like, people can feel like you. You take the things you learned and the structures and the things that make you uniquely you, and then you're trying to share them with the world in a way that can really benefit at other people. And, you know, that's where there's this, like, protective part of me that comes out.

Not that you need protection from anyone, let alone me to protect you, but. But I would. I would. You're a friend, and I would.

The thing that's frustrating is when you see people coming at your friends who are like. Like, you know, who are doing it from the heart, and then you're just like, damn. Like. Like, it's so. It's so aggravating, you know?

I mean, whatever they throw at me, and I'm sure we'll all get stuff thrown at us. More like, whatever they gets thrown at me, or, like, it's. The response internally for me, is nothing like the response when I see friends getting attacked. And we got some friends in the podcast community, I've got friends in the science community. Remember, academics are under fire right now.

They're losing jobs left and right, and there's a. That's a whole other biz. But, you know, you, you just. It brings out the spirit of, like, you want to just say, like, hey, they're trying to get it right. Stop.

Like, stop. But, you know, I think there will always be ten, maybe 20% of people who just, like, have taken upon themselves to, like, completely dismiss their own sense of agency and just try and tear people down because they feel like that's the right thing to do. But it's a completely misplaced sense of agency, you know? Yeah, I think that's just the way. That's just, that's just, as we say in Hawaii, that's just how right.

Jocko Willink

That's just how you got to be. You got to expect that stuff. I'm trying to learn to do this. Somebody really close to me who serves as an advisor to me is always just saying, like, he's like, that your life will become so much easier when you realize that there's a certain percentage of people that are just really unwell. And I'm like, no, no.

Andrew Huberman

Like, they're like, change their mind, or just. Or we can, we can talk about. We can figure this out, like, today. And they're like, no, no, they're that unwell. And I'm like, it drives me crazy.

And, you know, I think that that's my work, and my thing is to. Realize that there's something else to be careful of. And I made an explicit note when I was kind of getting ready for this, because I knew we were going to talk about, like, what's your true vocation? What's your calling, this irrational calling, and gotta go after that. Or there's a separation between the authoritarian things in the world that you kind of have to obey, and if that doesn't match up, you're gonna be.

Jocko Willink

You're gonna suffer. Here's the thing you gotta watch out for, too, is like, and you just said it, which is chasing your dreams. There's gonna be a lot of suffering, and there's absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that you ever get anything done good from it, like externally, there you look. If you're doing it, like when people, for a while, it was sort of now that everyone already has a podcast. Like everyone.

But there was a while where not everyone had one yet. And people would ask me like, hey, you know, I want to start a podcast. What do you think? Or what, what advice do you have? And I would say, if you want to do it because you, it's in your system and you want to get it out, cool, then go do that and upload it and be happy.

If you want to do it because you think a lot of people want to hear what you have to say and they're gonna listen to it. Don't, like, keep in mind there's a very slim chance that that's gonna happen. Cuz we're. I was just talking about this, like, most of the time, most people don't want to hear what you have to say. Like, that just doesn't, it's not normal.

Like, if I'm in a meeting, I sit there and think in a meeting, most people don't want to hear what I have to say. Like, people don't want to hear what you have to say. So that's most of us, most of the time. Occasionally you have this strain of knowledge that people wanted to hear. It's like, oh, wow, this guy, like you said, it landed with a bunch of people at a certain time.

Okay, that's uncommon. So if you are going to, for lack of a better word, follow your dreams, you have to do it because that's what you want to do for yourself, to get these things out there. And if the world happens to appreciate it, great. And if they don't, you gotta be okay with that. The chances are they're not gonna appreciate it.

The chances are your efforts and your suffering and your work is going to go. It's not going to be rewarded. It's just going to be out there. And if so, if you're doing it because of that, great. If you're doing it for some, if you're doing all these things for the external part, by the way, by the external forces, including your ego, that's another thing that Hollis talks about.

Hollis talks about your ego being an external force on the true you. So your ego is an external force that's saying, oh, I would like a bunch of people to listen to me, so therefore I'm going to write a book, or therefore I'm going to start a podcast, or therefore I'm going to do this performative thing in the world. Well, you better just make sure that you're doing it because you want to do it. Not to satisfy your ego, not to satisfy your neighbors, not to satisfy the interwebs or anybody else, because that's gonna be rough. It's gonna be rough.

That's. That would. I would just say, watch out for that if you want to do it because you think there's gonna be seven people that are gonna be freaking hyped for it, and you're down. Cool, dude. Do you think that I thought a bunch of people were gonna want to listen to me talk about the, you know, genocide and.

And war crimes and, like, I didn't think that did I think people were, oh, there's an out of print book from 1932 about world war one written in the first person that is out of print. Literally out of print. It doesn't exist anymore. I have a copy. I bet a bunch of people are going to want to hear me read and reflect on that.

What are the chances? No, we didn't do it for. I wasn't thinking, hey, I'm gonna go do this, so. Cause a bunch of people are gonna wanna listen to this. In fact, we haven't done that.

I haven't done that. It's like, oh, I've got a book that was written by a marine that was in Guadalcanal who wrote a first person account of what it was like for him. I want to read that. If anybody else wants to hear it, they can press play. If they don't, it's okay.

And I think having that attitude is a smart attitude to have. And I also think that it's the authentic thing to do. Totally. And I think that there's a way in which whatever we happen to be working on or caring about most. I'm not talking about podcasters, although it includes podcasters.

Andrew Huberman

That's the thing that if it feels like, almost like a compulsion, not the OCD clinical thing, but almost like it has to come out, then that's the best case scenario, because there isn't that deliberating. Do I do this? Do I not do this? Like, it has to come out, and it just runs through you. I mean, people talk about this, like, spirit running through you.

Hollis talked about this, about it. In the best circumstance, you drop in once a day or so, touch into your psyche, your spirit, who you are, your unique expression, and then something runs through you. It comes out, and it benefits the world. That's the ultimate form of humanity. Does it work that way?

Jocko Willink

Also? The rewards when they come can be distracting. They can contaminate. People start doing stuff for money. Rick's talked a lot about this in his previous book tour around the creative act.

Andrew Huberman

He talks about as you're offering to God, that's how he talks about creative expression. Because if you're paying attention to the metrics of, well, get paid this or do with that, then people start modifying. There's this amazing clip. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Basquiat about Jean Michel Basquiat. No.

Okay, amazing movie. Not the documentary. I haven't seen that. It's got Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, David Bowie, Parker Posey, Benicio del Toro. It's amazing.

And it's like him when he was coming up as a painter. Courtney Love. It's awesome. And the soundtrack, Basquiat. Basqu?

Jocko Willink

And this is a famous painter. Yeah, famous painter. The Andy Warhol. He was kind of a street artist. That made it big.

Andrew Huberman

Anyway, I won't give it away. Amazing, amazing movie. And there's this great scene where he's shooting hoops with his best friend, who's played by Beniso del Toro, who I think is supposed to be the young Vincent Gallo. And he asks him, he says to his friend Benny, who's Beniso del Toro, he goes like, hey, how long do you think it takes to get famous? And his dis.

And so Beniso, Lisa del Torre does this just brilliant one and a half minute description. I'll send it to you as a clip. Maybe we can link it, maybe not, I don't know. But one and a half minute description of how long it takes to get famous, how they'll reward you for doing something a certain way. And then when you try and evolve, they'll punish you.

So you continue to do the thing that initially got you famous, then you'll be rewarded again, but then they're going to hate you for doing it that way anyway. And then in the end, you end up right back where you started but basically wishing that you were an unknown person because then you could be left alone. And so it's just a brilliant, like street level, kind of like guy from Manhattan telling a friend, basically, listen, you got your life exactly where you want it. You're painting, you're making money, you have an apartment, you have a beautiful girlfriend. Like, you don't want that life.

And it's really interesting. And it's not to say that success is, success is great, but people, you have to be so mindful in any pursuit as to why you're doing something. And if it's a physical pursuit, like in the SEAL teams where you can get killed or it's a sport or it's music or something, like, if you get away from the essence of why you're doing it, there's. We know this. There's basically zero chance of success if you do it for the pure essence of it.

And I know Rick's talked about this. You just said it far more succinctly and eloquently than I could that. But there is a chance if you do it for the right reasons, you keep doing it for the practice of doing it. And it comes from the heart. And, you know, we talk about the heart, the heart, the heart.

And I think that it's one of these things where it's like, what is that? That's the thing where, like, you can't imagine not doing it and you're scared to do it, and it doesn't feel right. And it's also where you. And we haven't talked about this, like, aside from outside the teams, but where you also assemble the people around you that can help you do what you need to do. Like, I didn't go, oh, podcast mic in and go.

It was like, rob Moore, producer, get Mike playback, you know, pull together things again. I have many, many flaws, but one thing I've managed to do very well across my life, for whatever reason, is I can assemble an awesome, awesome team to do work. The people who have been in my lab, my students, my postdocs, like to get the best work done with, with a ton of attention to the right things. And, you know, and I look to them, I'm just like, they deserve, like, 99.9% of the credit. I raise some money to do it.

I try and guide them along, but just spectacular. A couple of them are professors now. Nothing makes me happier than, like, the call I got this morning. Hey, what do you think of this person? It was a woman who worked in my lab, who now has her own lab.

And I'm like, she's awesome. He's like, great. I'm putting her up for this big award. Yes. Like, nothing feels better, you know, this, like, nothing feels better than that.

So being able to assemble a team, even if it's one other person or someone that you can talk to at the end of the day or week, like, hey, check me on this. Like, no one goes at it completely alone. Some people in the podcast community or other communities are more of lone wolves, but nobody's doing this stuff alone. You just see that person. Lex has got a team.

Joe's got a team. You got a team. I got a team. Like, and you pull together those people, and that's huge. I don't care what your vocation is.

Like, you need people around you who can be, like, more of this, less of that, and iterate. Yeah. I do have to say that you can manufacture success with, like, my example is the monkeys. The band. The monkeys.

Jocko Willink

And you just take one of those boy bands, like a boy band where they say, hey, here's the formula. We need this beat. We need this, like, riff. We need this kind of lyrics. And they put them together.

We need this look, like they select the monkeys because this guy is the cute one and this guy's the jock one, and they do that. But here's the thing, and it's very obvious when you fast forward however many years. Oh. Like, they had no soul and they're kind of meaningless. And so that can happen.

Like, you can do that with music. You could do that with a podcast. You could do that with. You could write a, you know, a shocking title of a book and you could get it out there and it. But if you're.

If there. If it's not coming from a place that's real, then people will see through it. Yeah. It won't go anywhere. One podcast.

Andrew Huberman

That's great. I need to listen to it more, but I've listened to it some. Is the Founders podcast with David Senra. Just talks about founders, and he's covered, like, amazing. You can tell he's just like an ultra nerd about founders of companies and stuff.

It's spectacular podcast. And then when I went and visited Rick last summer, we would tread water in the morning. It's kind of like seal team type thing to do. But there, this is like Rick and me. So it's slightly different picture, but we're treading water.

And we would listen to history of 100 rock and roll songs by Andrew Hickey. And it's just an awesome podcast about rock and roll songs and stories. And I don't know, I didn't continue to listen to it when I got back, but I'm like, whoever that Andrew Key is, you know, he loves rock and roll history. And you just feel it. Like, he'll talk about rock.

He's probably talking about rock'n roll history right now. And so, yeah, like, learning stuff and teaching, that's always been my thing. Gather, organize, and disseminate information. And by the way, never did I say flawless human being. It's like, gather, organize, and disseminate what I think is valuable information.

And so I think it's interesting when we project onto other people their expectations. I'm being kind of tongue in cheek about it. But in all seriousness, no YouTube channel, no podcast is supposed to give you all the answers. You're supposed to create a composite, the things that are meaningful for you and focus on one more than the other. Maybe a couple, two or three different things.

I only listen about four or five different podcasts total, but, man, they've taught me so much. Yeah. What you just pointed out that this guy loves rock and roll, and he's talking about it right now. I mean, bro, I'll sit around, people ask me a question about leadership, I'm freaking gone. Like, I'm just talking about it forever.

Jocko Willink

Or somebody wants to ask me about some military thing, it's like, okay, well, you. You want to talk about that? Let's go. And you and I were having a conversation the other day, and you were mentioning this. I think it's.

Bill Gurley gave this talk, running down a dream. And he's basically saying, like, if you're not totally into this thing that you want to get into, someone's going to outwork you. Because I don't consider recording a podcast and reading a book to prepare for a podcast. I don't consider it work. I'm doing it cause I want to do it.

So if you're out there and you're like, well, I want to make a podcast, and I want to talk about stuff, too, and it's work for you, I'm going to beat you. And if that guy that loves rock and roll so much, bro, I guarantee he started that thing with. He was going to do it regardless. I don't know the particular podcast or who sponsored him or any of that stuff, but I guarantee he was like, I'm doing this podcast, and it doesn't matter what's happening. I'm doing this podcast about the great, greatest hundred rock and roll songs of all time.

Andrew Huberman

Boom. That's what I'm doing. And probably because of that passion, he made it, and then probably it became successful. But no matter what you're doing, if you're not 100% into it and you don't love it and it's not, and it's not your true vocation, it's going to be problematic. It's going to be rough.

I mean, one of the amazing things about becoming friends with Tim Armstrong is that he has Operation IV, rancid transplants with travis Barker and Rob Astin. It's an amazing band. A lot of people hear Travis and they think blank, but I always think aquabats. He's gonna laugh at that one. Aquabats.

And then I think, transplants. Amazing mashup of, like, punk rock and some hip hop tones and some hardcore stuff, too. Anyway, Tim, like, this is a guy. Who'S written over here on the old firm casuals. Yeah.

Lars. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm a huge Lars in the back Basterds fan. Huge.

I mean, like, don't get me started. But, you know, the amazing thing is, like, you know, in seeing how Tim works and he's written help, you know, a ton of pop male and female songwriters, and he's, you know, all this, but he, you know, he gets up and sometimes in the middle of the night and paints, then he'll go back to sleep. I know this. Sorry, Tim. I'm sharing a little bit this, but I think it's so valuable for people to hear.

And he doesn't really do front facing media anymore that love to get him on my podcast, but he does. Then he'll get up and he works out. He's super fit, does his workouts, but he also. He writes music every day. And for a while during the pandemic, he did this Tim Timebomb series where they were putting out a song a day.

I think him and Kevin Bavone from the interrupters. Like, I think that's who you do with, like, every day. So he's writing every single day. Guys all always got a guitar. Picking a guitar.

Jocko Willink

Always. He's got his studio. It's like, he's constantly helping artists develop stuff, and he's, like, either painting or writing music or working out or. He's got a great situation socially, personally. He's always in touch with his friends.

Andrew Huberman

He takes care of himself. He takes care of people. But he's ten years older than me, so he's 58. Every single day, he's writing music. I'm like, is there ever a day where you don't.

He's like, no. Every day. Constantly. Constantly. And so, like, there's no stopping him.

He's like a tank. You can't compete. He just. You can't compete. And he's giving, and he loves it, and you can just feel it.

And you ask him any question about anything with music, and he's just like, vroom. Like, he'll talk about guitars. I know I can't play any music. He'll talk about guitars for hours and hours. Like, he's just.

The fire is there, and he's aligned with it. And there's a kid who was basically, like, sparing for change, play, playing guitar on Telegraph Avenue in front of Blondie's pizza. I think he worked there for a little bit, too. Was hanging out at Gilman street. And there's that great line in journey to the end of the East Bay, like, whatcha gonna do when everybody goes on without you?

And that resonated with me over the years because all my skateboard friends kind of went up and forward. I was kind of lost in that time. Like, what are you gonna do when, like, other people find their vocation? I don't wanna inspire any fear in anybody, but it's like, he found it. He was like, this is what I'm good at, and this is the thing I love.

But good at meant, like, good at doing it all the time. And he just went. And at least to me, it's one of the more beautiful stories in music, because he's also outlived a lot of the people from that world, but he's just, like, the number of creative things he's involved in. There was movies that they've done. There's all sorts of stuff.

He's a character on the X Files. Sometimes he plays trash man. Gonna be. So he's gonna be laughing or ready to kill me that I'm talking about this. But, like, I just see him as, like, one of.

One of the many essences, although they're rare, of just pure creative energy. These are people that never stop creating. It's just in their soul. The same way that learning and sharing, like, right now, I'll be really, like, if I'm gonna be a little bit more vulnerable, as it were, you know? Like, sure.

Anything that's happening to me in my life now, I'm taking in new information learning. I didn't go talk to Hollis on accident. I want to know, from a guy who's 85 years old, like, how do you make the best version of yourself? How do you do that? How do you do that with tools that maybe I haven't had access to?

Clearly, I've succeeded in some areas of my life. I've struggled in others. Lord knows I've struggled like anyone else. And how do I, like, take. How do I take in information, learn, and do different?

You know, anytime we see somebody doing something, we're just like, why just do do it the other way? Like, clearly, people are rational, but sometimes there's some two plus two equals fives in their unconscious mind. So how do you pull that stuff out. So I think, like, the evolution of somebody is interesting to me. Certainly, I'm always trying to evolve, but just the desire to learn and take in information, make the changes, see what works, and then share, that's my thing.

You've got your thing. You've got your thing. And I think Tim's got his thing. Lars has his thing. I love when Lars posts about professional wrestling, because he loves professional wrestling.

Rick Rubin watches 10 hours a week of professional wrestling. You know, he told me, he said it's the only thing that's real. Cause everyone agrees it's fake. He told me, he said, once I sent him something, it was really disturbing from the news. It's about somebody we know.

So it's a while back, and he just wrote back. He texted, I'll never forget. I screenshot this. He said, it's all lies. Back to nature, the only truth.

And I was like, what are you talking about? That sounds like a riddle wrapped in a myth with a. He's like the sphinx. What are you talking about? He's like, anytime we go back into nature, we're in touch with truth.

Like, there's no negotiating. That's a fern. That's a tree. You're. You're the.

And that takes us to this place where we start again to kind of, like, ask, what's my essence in the. In this bigger picture? When we're taking in all this stimulus, you know, that's when we get kind of overwhelmed and we start becoming reactive and little unconscious ways, and we lose touch with ourself. I mean, I don't have a language for this yet. And I think Hollis goes the greatest distance towards putting a language.

And I think you're onto this, too now. We're kind of, like. We're kind of pulling along this line underwater and trying to figure out, like, where does this go? But there's something. There's got to be tools.

And I think that sitting with oneself for 1015 minutes a day quietly and listening, there's got to be something that allows us to go. Like, this is my unique gift. And I don't mean me, Andrew. I mean everybody. I do believe.

Believe that everyone has a unique gift, that they're. That would better the world were they to lean into that gift. I absolutely do. It's just, it's a. It's a.

It's not a fantasy. I believe it because Hollis said it and the psychologists have said it. And it's. It's what makes us who we are. It's what makes us different than the other animals.

Jocko Willink

And this sets me up for the last thing. And we've already been going almost 3 hours, so I don't want to drag this out too much. But the last thing, which is a good counter to that, which you and I were talking about the other day, and that is as much as we're both sitting here saying, you gotta do the thing that you love, you also got to do the things that you don't want to do. Absolutely. And you were talking about this kind of.

I don't know if these are recent discoveries, but things that go on in your brain that are so beneficial, but they only occur when you're doing things that you don't want to do. Tell me about that. Oh, yeah. To me, this is, you know, I. Maybe it's because I've had a bunch of friends die.

Andrew Huberman

Okay. And again, I just, like, get in this, like, slightly kind of, like, abrasive mode where, you know, like, talk shit about me all you want, but don't talk shit about my dog. Okay? Don't. Don't talk shit about my dog.

And don't talk shit about my friends that are. That aren't here, that actually checked out, don't. That John Ichabod, Johnny Ferrers, the Aaron King, Currys. Like those guys, like, other people just don't come at me with anything. But not that.

Cause that's just like, a step too far. You understand this fully? Okay. So if ever there was a discovery in neuroscience that I think people should know about, and I mentioned those guys and that theme because I think every day, okay, bullet bus or cancer, like, if I were gonna be taken out today, like, what do I want to make sure is in the world, okay, because when that bus comes or whatever, you know, that's it. Like, sometimes that's it.

So I think, okay, what's the discovery in the recent years that I think everyone needs to know about? I blabbed a lot about dopamine. I blabbed a lot. Okay, get some sunlight, please. The anterior mid cingulate cortex is this brain region that I knew about.

I teach neuroanatomy to medical students. Do it every January. Did it this last January. Do it next January. Taught it for years.

The anterior mid cingulate cortex, neuroscientists knew was there. They didn't know what it did. It's an area that gets inputs and outputs from a lot of different brain areas. Like a hub. It gets inputs from the dopamine system, serotonin system, motor system.

It's, like, interconnected with with a ton of stuff. But a colleague of mine at Stanford, Joe Parvizi, he's a neurosurgeon, is operating on a patient and stimulating different brain areas and gets in and starts tickling neurons with an electrode in the anterior midcingulate cortex. And the patient, and it turns out every patient where he does this says, I feel like there's a storm coming at me, but I'm gonna go through it, or, I feel like something's about to happen, but I can lean into it. Okay, interesting. Moves the electrode back a few millimeters.

Totally different picture. Okay, so this is super interesting. The anterior mid cingulate cortex increases in size when people take on hard challenges on a consistent basis. Decreases in size when they don't, it increases in size in successful dieters, exercisers, people taking on a new skill, it's maintaining size. Unlike in other people, it maintains size in a group of people called superagers.

It's a bit of a misnomer, because what are superagers? Superagers are people that maintain cognitive ability late into life. They're constantly learning, taking on new challenges. Okay, the summary that we now have is that the anterior mid cingulate cortex is a brain area that's highly plastic, that grows, that becomes active, and that can actually grow under conditions where we lean into things that we don't want to do. So if you love working out, sorry, you love reps to failure.

I love reps to failure. I came up training, like, under the Mike Mentzer thing, although I add a few more sets and a bit more frequency. Kind of darn Yates. You're wasting your time. And it worked, and it worked for me.

It's like, it's what my body reacted best to, given my time constraints. And, like, it's what worked best for me. I occasionally do a little bit more volume, but that's what works for me, to get stronger. So the anterior. So training that way isn't going to do it, but you send me out on a, like, a five mile ruck on a day with, like, just this amount of water that sucks.

Might even be dangerous, but probably survive if it's not too hot. If it sucks and you do it anyway, your anterior mid cingulate cortex gets bigger and it transfers to other aspects of life. And this is something that I think we've missed in the do hard things thing, is we miss that the hard to you. Hard to you. It's not sufficient to just do something that other people think is hard.

If you love getting in the cold plunge, like, it's not doing as much for your anterior mid cingulate cortex as if you hate getting in that thing. So I think it's beautiful. Like, I think it's beautiful that neuroscience discovered this. I do feel like it landed on my lap to tell everybody about it. I'm going to blab about it until I, you know, until they tell me to stop or they stop me or give me a tracheotomy, and then I'll probably just be.

But the point being that this thing does not care about the stuff you want to do. That's hard. You know, if you love grinding reps to failure, you'll benefit. Clearly, there's benefits to that exercise, but it's. It's the stuff you hate.

It's. If you're a talkative person, you want to be right, and you sit down and you. You're going to do the. Okay, I got to listen for 97% of the conversation. It's that.

That's where the girl. And the great news is, this area is so interconnected that it's clear that it carries over to other types of behavior so that you can tackle other things that you would otherwise avoid. Then the last point is that this thing about the superagers is not trivial. It very well may be that the brain is paying attention to our efforts to absorb new information and grow itself. And the brain, of course, controls the body.

We know that the body talks back to the brain, but the brain largely controls the body. And there's some interesting data based on the longevity stuff. And here I'm not talking about living to be 200. I think genetic limit for aging is probably 120. And then there's variability in there depending on genetics and lifestyle, etcetera.

But what ends up happening, it seems, is that this brain area is also related to the will to live, the desire to keep pushing. If ever there were an appropriate place to talk about this, it would be here. Because I think when I hear about buds or when I take Costello out to Coronado sometimes, and he'd run around, I'd see guys out there doing their thing. Like, clearly they're trying to find their. Who's going to ring the bell?

They're trying to find the people that can learn to do the thing they hate anyway. And I think I got a few things wrong. Early days of the podcast, not scientifically wrong, but I put so much emphasis on learning to make the effort, the reward, which it can happen. But what we missed out on is that, like, sometimes the effort supposed to suck, and maybe, probably and based on these data on the interim mid singular cortex certainly when the effort sucks, you're really benefiting. So I keep that in mind a lot.

And it scares me and I hate it. And I guess that's exactly the point. Well, there you go. That's a good bookend. Yeah, because we talk about doing what you want to do and doing what you love to do but you still got to do things you don't want to do.

Jocko Willink

Probably a pretty good place to wrap. Echo. Charles? Yeah. Sorry.

You got any questions? We're not rapping yet. Okay. Well, I figured we had some questions over here. Wait, so you.

Echo Charles

We didn't go into the neurotic part of it. So you. We were talking about OCD, but then what? So then what's neurotic thing? Because I thought neurotic.

I guess I was getting them kind of. Yeah. Well, this is kind of fun because the word neurotic actually used to be what the. What the freudian and jungian analysts would consider healthy. They said the best you could be was neurotic.

Andrew Huberman

And what you want to avoid is being psychotic. That's the kind of old school language. Keep in mind what we think of as neurotic now. They might have thought was different maybe just like, of the neurons or something. I don't know.

Yeah. Neurotic people, as a stereotype are people that, like, are very effusive and kind of, like, can't be satisfied by anything. There's always some underlying dissatisfaction but we have to be careful because that itch is what drives us. And sometimes someone can be really neurotic but quiet. I work with a guy who likes to tell me.

He goes, yeah. I'm like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. And I'm like, you're the calmest dude I know. He's like, yeah, I'm stressed all the time, so people. People hide it well.

People hide it well. So I don't have a lot to say about it except that I think neurotic people and people that are just anxious in general. I mean, I'm with Jocko on this one. Do more. Tire yourself out.

Like, I mean, there's some dogs that are just, like, tail always going. They need a lot of running. And then there are the Costellos that were just, like, super chill. And that, like, economy of effort is the name of the game. Yeah.

Echo Charles

So for example. So I know a guy, we went over to his house for Christmas. It was me, my friend, the kids. So there they had a Christmas tree. The ornaments were on the Christmas tree wasn't the fragile kind of ornaments.

It was just like regular ornaments. And one of the kids was over there by the Christmas tree, like, kind of pawing at one of the ornaments, and the guy didn't know the kid. It was the first time, you know, he had been introduced to the kid. And the. And the dad, they were just kind of guests at the house.

And he was like, you could tell he was really bothered about the kid almost, I don't know, disrupting the ornaments or whatever, maybe. I don't know. I don't think they could break. But he was just like. He's like, hey, hey, hey.

You know, almost like he lost control of himself because of that scenario. And I was like, does he have kids of his own? No. Yeah, it sounds like having had kids living with me before, it's. It's.

Andrew Huberman

It's a. You just have to embrace that, like, stuff's gonna get dirty. Stuff. Yeah, bro. Embrace the wildness.

It. Yeah, it's. It's like a. It's like a punk rock. I thought.

I thought at that moment, I was. Like, okay, cuz it had nothing to do with me. Wasn't my kid. What am I? Was my ornament.

Echo Charles

I don't care. Observer. You know, but I was like, oh, that guy seems a bit neurotic because that doesn't move me either way. Even if it was my ornament. Yeah.

You know, is he. Is he neurotic? He's uptight or just okay, so tight is like. Yeah, yeah. I mean, one thing we know for sure is trying to, you know, control the behavior of others or, you know, or get them.

Andrew Huberman

Gosh, like, life's got to be pretty challenging for that guy. Don't. Just day to day kind. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know that he's not.

Jocko Willink

A happy camper, bro. No, that's. I mean, the world is. The world's full of havoc and, like, stuff isn't aligned and, you know, like, you know, like, you know, that kind of thing. I mean, some people have the counting obsession thing, you know, but.

Andrew Huberman

Yeah, that sounds like he's uptight. I don't know that we could diagnose him, but I'm calling him up tight. A little uptight. Yeah. So that's like this, what, the street version of neuros.

Echo Charles

Neuroses is that word? Yeah. Nowadays, people are using these terms, like neurotic and narcissist. Like, I mean, all these accounts on Instagram, like, people calling each other names. It's like people.

Andrew Huberman

People have given themselves like, the authority to use DSM diagnoses. I mean, it's kind of wild. Then again, I'm a guy who talks about dopamine and serotonin, but those are real things, right, that exist in all of us. I mean, I think the clinical definitions of these things become really important. We have to be careful because we will erode the importance of real psychological diagnosis.

Where you're obsessed, you're OCD or someone's calling, they're like, well, you're. You're whatever. Like, you know, I think we have to be very careful about not drifting. Into that kind of, like, the word literally nowadays, right? Because people are like, oh, yeah, no, literally now means like just very much so.

Echo Charles

Not like for real. You know, like, the word literally has become not literally. Well, the Internet's a free, largely free, open resource for people to declare themselves. Whatever. A few years, years back, I won't say what platform I was contacted because there was discussion about only certain accounts being able to talk about things from any kind of diagnostic labels or health labels.

Andrew Huberman

And I think there was just so much pushback because, you know, we put great value on degrees, and obviously, I'm degreed, so I put some value on it. But then, of course, we know that there's a lot of great information, like, in the health sector, like, especially exercise physiology and stuff that comes from outside of the standard practices. Like, I'm a big fan of knees over toes guy, Ben Patrick, and, you know, some people are like, well, that doesn't fit with what the, like, orthopedic surgeon say. And like, but then everyone goes, well, he's the guy doing the, you know, the standing still to dunk the basketball into a backbend. I know Ben.

He's awesome and like, and he's very generous with information. Kind of like, well, you look at the orthopedic surgeon, and he looks like he needs to take a few laps. And then you look at Ben and you're like, his knees look pretty good. So I think, you know, we have to. I don't know.

I'm a. And Derek, more plates, more dates. Doesn't have any kind of degree, does he? I mean, he has a college degree in something else, but he's a business, but he's so, so knowledgeable about the practical applications of things. And he reads papers very well.

Like, it's a real skill to extract the best of papers. And he's extremely knowledgeable, very thoughtful. And again, a person, like, he took what he loved and put it out there for the greater good. You know, he's done a lot of harm reduction. I also think he's just really, really smart.

Like, I'm pretty good at spotting intelligence. He's really smart. And it comes through. Yeah. And to your point, he's not a guy that he didn't go to school for it.

Jocko Willink

Neither did Ben from knees over toes. So those are two guys that through experience and research and personal knowledge, they've can put out really good information that can be really helpful to people. And then there's this. Isn't that kind of offensive to some people? Oh, yeah, they hate it.

Like, that's got to drive some people. Crazy because it means they would have to go do something. They'd have to activate their mincing. Did anybody, does anyone get mad at you for validating these freaking charlatans that are out there? Sure, sure.

Andrew Huberman

But I'm just gonna say, like, look at the results. They speak for themselves. Also, I've been working out since I was 16, and I also been running since I was in high school, and so. Oh, so you actually have dual degrees. You also have a degree in bro science.

Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting because. And I've had plenty of training partners that were women, and they kick butt and they. Yes. Their unique needs that people have.

I mean, one person I'd like to mention, I know that we're both friends with her, but also because she represents the combination of a number of different things. Medical doctor, so MD, also very good teacher and information sharer, as well as a practitioner who's clearly got her own health, not just worked out, but is really thriving, is Doctor Gabrielle Lyon, who knows a ton about nutrition as well. So the space, this health space in particular, is starting to bring in people. They're already here and there that are checking off multiple boxes. And I'm excited about the work she's doing, not just for women in particular, but also for men.

I think she's getting a specialization in urology. Her husband's urologist. They're open about the fact she's former team guy. So, I mean, there's a lot of constant. I wanted to go down that she worked in a freaking, like a sane asylum.

Did she? Oh, yeah, for a while as a psychologist. And I almost wanted to. I mean, we only talked about it for 20 minutes, but what's going on in there? Because, you know, I've never met anyone that was worked in an actual, like, asylum.

Jocko Willink

It was kind of crazy. Oh, man, I gotta introduce you to somebody I'm close with. Who is a psychiatrist who spent a lot of time out saying, quentin, examining the files and talking to the people of the worst, gnarliest cases. I'll be in touch with him. I couldn't bear to hear the stories.

Andrew Huberman

I'm not. I'll have him on the podcast. That'd be interesting. Great. Yeah, he's impressive, but, yeah, I mean, I've caught some stuff for it, but, you know.

Yeah, I think Ben's great, and I think there are others that are. Who are degreed, like Ben Bruno training is a friend of mine. He's not the biggest guy, but he's super strong. Like circus man strong, you know? So you look at what people can do, and it's not just physique.

You look at what they can do performance wise, movement wise, the duck, Kelly Starrettes, and you just go, okay, listen, these people obviously know what they're doing, and sometimes they're degreed, sometimes they're not. I think the word expert nowadays is a complicated one. I think it's almost like, what does that mean? It depends on people's orientation and how they approach health and science information. And listen, there's been a real fight for trying to make sure that only one source of information is considered valid.

That fight has been lost. That fight's been lost. It's been lost because as long as COVID. Oh, gosh. You said it, not me.

I think. Because I didn't say that. No, but I think the fight has been lost because people start to realize that diverse sources of information filtered through a logical mind where one can try things safely. And here. I'm not talking about COVID Okay, I wanna be clear.

I'm talking about kind of daily self care. And I'm not saying that to be politically avoidant or anything like that. It's just like. It's just that that became such a tangle on the Internet. And I think that when.

When it comes to how to eat, how to exercise, is ozempic, you know, the right thing for you? Or should you rely on something like, those are conversations that I think, like, need to happen and are happening. And look, whatever this beast, the Internet, social media, is that people thought could be just used to communicate one type of information. Well, I got news for you. Too late.

Jocko Willink

So the fat loss thing, right? Yeah. A lot of people are losing a lot of weight because it reduces appetite. And so. And so are people coming at that from both directions.

Are some people saying it's good for you and some people saying it's bad for you? Yeah. So. And a t. Has more to say about this.

Andrew Huberman

There can be some muscle loss in addition to fat loss, so people can, so people can offset that with some resistance training. So it's not good, not all good or all bad. It's clear that people are benefiting from it. It's very expensive. There's this question whether or not insurance will soon take care of it.

It's on track to be, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars.

The kind of polarization here is as follows, and I won't reveal my stance. I'll just tell you the way I understand it, and I'll probably get it only 80% right, that some people are positioning this as, hey, doesn't matter what you do, lifestyle or try and eat less, this is the only thing that works. And there's, you know, people are genetically or metabolically stricken and they need to do this. Other people are saying, no, you don't need to do that. There's a bunch of lifestyle things you can do.

And the answer is probably somewhere in the middle where you can imagine that it probably helps some people get to a lighter weight that then allows them to move around a bit more. And one would hope then they would resistance train and they would do cardiovascular training. But the way it's been positioned, kind of like sociopolitically, is that it's one versus the other. And that agency over one's health, mental health and physical health is the domain of one political camp. And the other political camp is like, no.

Like, it's all about using certain treatments that are coming through pharma. That's not real. Right. But that's how the conversations on social media and the kind of media landscape would have you think about this. But of course, it's going to be the league of reasonable people, as you point out, which makes up, most people are going to say, all right, let's say somebody's like 40 pounds overweight and they're really struggling.

Maybe it's a good starter for them. Maybe it's a good place for them to drop a bunch of weight and then start exercising. Other people are going to say, hey, listen, I never want to exercise, but I want to be healthier. Well, maybe that's the right thing for them. I'm not going to argue with them.

But I do think that you can do a hell of a lot. We know this with proper nutrition, with really tasty food, exercise, and sunlight and sleep and taking good carry yourself. And the information is all out there for free. Mm hmm. You just gotta tickle that intermittent singular cortex a bit, you know?

Jocko Willink

So get in there. What else? That the word expert is kind of like the world. The word world champion. Yeah, because you know how, like.

Echo Charles

Like me, I'm a grappling x world champion. Oh. Seems actually, I did not even know. But I can. You guys can see that.

Jocko Willink

Oh, you thousand eight. Yeah, but if it's not, like, what recognized as a governing body, you know what? Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Right.

Andrew Huberman

But factually. Factually, let's face it, I won the gold medal. Seems a little champ. Well, you want your surgeon to be an MD, you know, like. Like, you want your lawyer to understand the law, right?

You, I would hope you want your SEAL team operator to have made it through buds. You know? You want that. Okay. But the word expert, though, you see.

I'm saying, like, whether. Can we not use the word expert. Even though, you know, now it's a free for all. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

Echo Charles

Exactly. It's a free for all. And I think that the interwebs a complicated place, but it's also stupidly simple at the same time, because once you understand what you're looking at, that it's a borderline situation, and you realize that the goal is clicks and polarized things get clicks. Well, then, if you're a reasonable person, you're part of the league of reasonable people who want to access it, the right information. What it means is you're gonna have to look at information across the board.

Andrew Huberman

Integrate, try, see what works for you, what doesn't work for you, and probably avoid the strong opinions at the extremes, like the outliers. That. That's my suggestion. Okay, so, perfect. So my second to the last question.

Echo Charles

So to be part of the bear with me. I'm bearing. But if I want to be part of the league of reasonable people, what would be, like, one of the obvious criteria, like, I would say, and I don't know, this is with 10 seconds of thought, if I lose my temper on the Internet, I'm automatically disqualified. No, because the league of reasonable people understands that we're not supposed to judge people based on a state. You can potentially judge them on the basis of trait.

Andrew Huberman

But one state, mine, one, you know, assuming you don't do something like. Like, horrific, right. That if you can recognize, like, oh, I was in a state of mind at that time, and it just doesn't faithfully represent who I am and the people around me know me to be, then we'll be like, you're absolutely still in the league of reasonable people. What if I do that three times? Well, then a row, then we, then the people close to you might say, hey, like listen, you might need some help.

I mean, if you've ever been online and you have a channel you're familiar with this, I'm sure you get someone who's just like adoring you, adoring you, adoring you then tells you they're going to stop following you and then start sending attack stuff. You're probably looking at somebody who is bipolar. Then they disappear, then they come back. Like you're probably remember, a lot of times people are drunk when they're sending these messages and posting, you'll forget like, they're wild. We're not good at ascribing state of mind and other people, so, no, you're absolutely in the league of reasonable people.

Jocko Willink

Why? Because you asked the question, which means that you're a reasonable person. Oh, I was more asking for a friend, but, but, or more of a hypothetical, if you will. Cuz, look, I would imagine. Look, I don't want to make it a big thing, you know, cuz obviously it's still hypothetical, but I feel like after about ten temporal losses, infractions, drunk or not drunk, after a while you're like, bro, is this guy want to be part of the league or not?

Andrew Huberman

Yeah, maybe penalty box at that point. Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, I mean let's. What would it be in the military? Like enough safety violations.

Echo Charles

The same way. Exactly. Maybe we put some kind of restraints on your something, you know, at least something right there. Again, let's not normalize, let's not authenticate unethical behavior just because it's frequent. People drunk drive all the time.

Andrew Huberman

But we all know it's a terrible thing to do, so don't do it. But we also don't want to pathologize by labeling people to the point where they think, oh, if they drunk drive, God forbid, please don't. But if they do that, somehow they are incapable of change, especially if they still have a driver's license. Yeah, I dig it. What if they do it ten times in a row?

Echo Charles

I don't know, bro. Then there's diagnostics. They're going to jail, bro. They're out of the league. Okay, all right.

Okay, last question. You use this expression which just kind of real casually immune privileged. The brain is immune privileged. What does that mean? Immune privileged?

Andrew Huberman

Yeah. So you have two immune systems. One is called the innate immune system. This is the one that, like, let's say you get a splinter. You get some pus around it, some swelling.

There's not really antibodies to a splinter. It's just your innate immune system going, hey, there's a foreign body in here that's not me. The body is so good at recognizing, not of me, and then creating a bunch of responses, trying to isolate it, et cetera. Then you have the adaptive immune system, which comes along and starts making antibodies. So let's say you have a bacteria or virus gets into you at first.

The innate immune system, like, in the first 24 to 72 hours, is gonna be like, hey, let's just contain this thing somehow, or launch a like, it might make you want to sleep if it's a virus, like it does. But then comes the second wave where the adaptive immune system, which is amazing, we have a whole discussion about this, basically sends out these, like, these cells that go, oh, what is this thing? And then they go, what's on the surface of it? What's the shape of this thing? Oh, wow.

Okay. Then they go back, and the body actually manufactures antibodies that then can go and stick to the surface of this thing to make sure that it can't either spread and or go attach itself to other parts of the body, that it's just, like, amazing. And then there's, like, another wave where it's, like, an even more specific antibody. So the idea was that the brain is immune privileged, that there's no antibodies, innate or adaptive immune system in the brain, or certainly not no adaptive immune system. And doctor Carla Schatz, who coined the term fire together, wire together.

Brilliant neurobiologist at Stanford, now has been at Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, all those places. She was the one that said, well, let's just, like, test this idea. Maybe the brain actually does have an immune system, and lo and behold, has immune system. Boom. There's an entire field born of that critical field for a treatment of brain cancers, for treatment of brain plasticity, and on and on.

Echo Charles

So immune privileged is essentially, it has the privilege of having an immune system. Sorry, didn't mean to drop. But the word immune privilege were meant to refer to that. It's not. There's no immune system in the brain.

Andrew Huberman

Now we know that the brain is not privileged. Like every other organ in the body, it is subject to the workings of the immune system. Okay, so it's kind of like, yeah. It'S more like the superagers thing. I know scientists are low getting things backwards.

Just confuse people and keep it secret so we can talk about, pretend we know more than other people. Just kidding. Just kidding. Just kidding. They'll clip the.

Just kidding. Someone take off the Internet, it'll be just kidding. Hubs over here. There were worse nicknames, but I'll tell you those later. Oh, so, okay, so what is.

Echo Charles

So there is no immune privileged scenario in the body or there is. There may be a few. Few areas, but no, pretty. Pretty much your entire body is subject to immune function. Like your hair, maybe the niche of the stem.

Andrew Huberman

The hair follicle has stem cells in there? No, there's immune system stuff going on in there, too. All good, then. All right, cool. That's all I got.

Echo Charles

I was gonna ask about track and field. What are we, like 100 meters dash? No, man. I go up to Hayward. I went for the worlds.

Andrew Huberman

I go for the track and field qualifiers whenever. I only didn't go during COVID because it wasn't open. The 5012 laps. Steve Prefontaine. Talk about a hard race.

He died right in drunk driving thing. But his thing was, he was calling it. He was going to do 1260 2nd laps. The 5000 falls on the last day. I'm going to be up there.

We already got seats. You guys should come up. I invite cam. Like, I want to be there to watch the 5000. That's just a brutal, brutal race.

I mean, think about three mile, three mile sprint. Yeah. Looks like a sprint to me, anyway. I think in the Olympics they should have like a very skilled recreational swimmer go back and forth next to the rest of them. Yeah, yeah.

Or a very jujitsu wouldn't make any sense. But swimmer, I mean, have you ever, like, walked along the pool and someone's a high caliber swimmer? Like, it's a. They're. They're hauling.

Oh, yeah, you're a swimmer. Because you wouldn't even. You wouldn't even be like, the recreational swimmer wouldn't be in the game. He wouldn't be in the camera. Right?

Like, he would just be, like, he'd be fishing. They'd be on to the next. They'd be on the next event. Freaking whatever. Yeah.

Those guys and gals are missiles in the water. You're probably a pretty good swimmer despite your thickness. You're. Dude, earlier I saw you, gave you a dap and a hug, and I was like, man, like, you and you and Rogan, like, whenever I'm like, damn, you guys turn socks like this thing. It's crazy.

Like, is that jiu jitsu? Well, Jiu jitsu is definitely part of it, but there's guys that are not, you know, big. Yeah. And they're sick at Jiu jitsu, there's guys that, there's guys that feel kind of like noodley. You got to watch out for those dudes a little bit because they're going to get a little bit crazy with their flexibility.

Who's that kid? I like his Instagram account. Mikey, is that his name? Mikey Musa met you? Yeah, he's.

His Instagram account is amazing. Yeah, he's so freaking crazy flexible, and he's, he's just really sick at jujitsu. Yeah, he's, he's amazing and a great guy. Like a. Just a super good hearted dude who fought against this other guy, and the other guy wouldn't tap.

Jocko Willink

I'll show you the video. You'll. His just ripping. His. All of his ligaments are getting totally destroyed and the guy's not tapping and he doesn't tap.

And Mikey afterwards was just kind of like, he was a little bit freaked out, you know, I bet. I mean, psycho. Yeah, that's some GGI stuff right there. Only ten people are gonna know that joke. My friend got into a street fight and did an arm lock on someone and he said, he goes, you know when you're trying to break a chicken bone off of the chicken and it, like, you press it and then it goes, and then you'll go the other direction and you're just breaking all the ligaments.

That's what when you see this Mikey Musa Metchi doing it to this guy's leg and the guy's just not topping. Oh, that's not adaptive. I was talking to Mike Perez the other day. ADCC just, just won ADCC open class. He's 170 pounds, but he's like talking about footlocks and knee locks.

He's like, yeah, I'm not tapping. He goes, I've turned off that switch, like, and he's been in tournaments where he's just got his ankle destroyed and just didn't happen one because he just turned off that sweatshirt. I'm not tapping. So that, to me, I mean, it's, it's a decision that you're going to make. And certainly when you watch though, the, the highest level of submission, arts submission, grappling, ADCC, those guys, they will absolutely sacrifice their freaking tendons for a victory.

It's crazy. And look, I know what it takes to recover from an ACL, so I've never had it, but I know, like, you're, you're out for a year, but these guys are going for the world championship. Doesn't matter there. You can have the ACL. You can just take it, you can keep it.

Andrew Huberman

Some people, it's the body, other people, it's the family, you know? You gotta be careful, you know? I know children of academics who are, like, really messed up because their parents were just like, going for it all the time at work, you know, like, you know, like there's, you know, there's. It comes in different forms, you know? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Jocko Willink

The sacrifice you're willing to make. It's pretty disturbing to watch someone get their ACL snapped and not tap from. The heart does not mean foolish, reckless abandon. Be smart. Agree.

Where can people find you? Hubermanlab.com is kind of the central place to find everything. We got links out to all the podcasts, everything's zero cost. The search function there, you put in anything, take you to timestamps, AI, human lab on all social platforms, keep it simple. Yeah, human lab, you're out there.

Let's see. We don't always want to work out. Now, we know that we're going to work out anyways, when we work out, we're going to need some fuel. Let me send you to jaquafuel.com. Dot, you just had a.

You just. You've been drinking right here. Yeah, you know, and again, I don't get paid to say this, we don't have any deal, nothing like that. I. My sources of caffeine are yerba mate, some coffee, and.

Andrew Huberman

But if I drink an energy drink, I'm gonna drink these, cause I love em. And you got your specific yerba mate, what is it? So if people wanna get in there. Matina and I have a relationship to them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a zero sugar, get you some. I have a relationship to Jaco fuel, so we're kind of on an even. Yeah, I mean, my dad's Argentina, as I mentioned, I grew up, you know, drinking mate out the gourd with, you know, the loose leaf. They sell a loose leaf. I helped them design a zero sugar cold brew, one that I like a lot.

It's like 150 milligrams of caffeine. It doesn't have the nootropics in it. So this is like, if I need that zip, the extra kick, and I'll do one or two of these, I have to say, if I do one of these, because I'm not that conditioned to. I'm like going, they're good, they're good. I'm going, this one's really good.

I would not say that if I didn't really feel that, and I love it. Yeah. So I hit the energy drinks usually before workout. Yeah. Or a three and a half hour long jocko podcast.

Jocko Willink

So there you go. Jockofuel.com. Check that out. Also originusa.com. We got stuff made in America.

100% rebelling against the world, bringing manufacturing back to America. So crazy. And we're making it happen. It's diY, by the way. It's diY.

We're making it happen. Just do. We got this new workout gear. It's freaking legit. Is it jiu jitsu or.

No, no, it's just workout training gear. And I'll get you some and you'll be freaking pumped. It's all made 100% in America. The fabrics made in America, sewn in America. So whatever you're doing jujitsu, working out jeans.

Cuz you need jeans, you can't go to the club in your Gi. Echo Charles no, no, no. In San Diego. That's probably a lot. Yeah, sure they did.

Andrew Huberman

It's like, you know, when I was in the lab, more doing experiments, it was Halloween. I just used to wear my lab coat and just go. It was kind of lame, but, you know, I was working late. I still make the Halloween party. Yeah, you can't wear your out echo Charles despite the g and a gee scenario.

Jocko Willink

Despite the GNE scenario. It's a long story. It's a long story and a good one. But you need jeans, boots. We got you covered.

Originusa.com comma, bringing manufacturing back to America. Don't support communism. Don't support slave labor. Don't support companies that trash our environment, which if you get stuff that's made overseas, they have no EPA, they have no rules, and they just pollute and they ruin the, the earth. So don't put up with that.

Don't put up with slave labor. Originusa.com. Go check it out. Hey, also origin USA, check this out. We've got a, we do a jujitsu camp, right?

It's in Maine this year. We're doing a law enforcement jujitsu camp. It is August 27 through the 31st. So if you're in law enforcement or first responder or military and you want to get training that's focused on that environment, then check it out@originusa.com. The Leo the jiu jitsu camp's already sold out.

The jiu jitsu camp itself sells out in like a matter of hours. So this is open for first responders, military, law enforcement. Check that out. Chocolate store.com. You can get cool t shirts there.

Echo Charles yes. Represent discipline equals freedom. Because it does, by the way, equal freedom. Yeah. You want to represent.

Boom. This. We can get it good. All this other stuff. Short locker, new design every month.

Echo Charles

Subscription scenario. People seem to like them. People still hitting me up for the sugar coated lies. What is short short locker. Shirt locker.

Andrew Huberman

Shirt locker. Play on words. Hurt locker. It's a long story, but it's called the shirt locker. So basically, you have a subscription, you get a new shirt with a discipline.

Echo Charles

Equals freedom design. But we go a little bit more free as far as the. The creative. So you remember you're talking about how people have it in them. They got to get that creativity out.

Jocko Willink

Well, echo Charles got that. Needs to get it out. I have my good shirt. Yeah. Hell, yeah.

Echo Charles

So we have a good. So an old shirt from the shirt locker. Cause they're just like one month, and then they're gone. See what I'm saying? But actually, when you join, you can get one from the past.

So you're all good. If you're a member, whatever. But we have a good one. Says good, but it's like, in this. What would you call it?

Jocko Willink

Calligraphy. Fancy, whatever. Cursive. Cursive. Cursive.

Echo Charles

Right. Looks, like elegant, which is kind of not Jocko's jam or whatever, but that one's called good, high level problems. See what I'm saying? Yeah. And all that means is, hey, you can be in the gutter.

You can have problems. They still got to approach with that attitude, or you can be freaking, you know, what do you call top 1% type scenarios? A damn, I got a flat tire on my Mercedes AMG. Yeah. Or the Uber eats guys later.

Jocko Willink

I don't know. Whatever these higher level and, you know, whatever problems, you still need the same attitude. That's what I'm saying. Same thing. People seem to like that one.

Echo Charles

It's kind of relatable. Anyway, like I said, it's a new design. People seem to like it. Like the short locker. It's on Jocko's also.

Jocko Willink

You're gonna need some steak. We're getting ready to go have some steak right now. And we're gonna have some primal beef or some color. We're having both. We're cooking them both.

Primal beef. Primal beef.com comma Colorado, craftbeef.com. Best steak you can get. Go check those out. Subscribe to the podcast Jocko underground.com.

Check that one out if you want to get in there. We have YouTube channels. All of us have YouTube channels, so check out the YouTube channels. Psychological warfare, flipside, canvas, Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. You got a shirt that says good.

You might want a freaking, what's it called? A piece of art to hang on your wall says good from Dakota Meyer. Can't go wrong. I've written a bunch of books about leadership. I've written kids book.

You heard it today. We got a kid's movie coming out. It's actually, it's actually something. Echo Charles, four quadrant movie. Do you know what that is?

Echo Charles

No. Four quadrant movie. This is a movie that goes for the whole family. All quadrants are covered. I don't know what the four are, but it's obviously the kids.

Yeah. Maybe the teens, maybe the parents and maybe even the grandparents love it. So four quadrant movie. This is what it's called. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

So that's what we got coming. So it doesn't matter who you are in the fam. Yeah. You're still gonna get something out of it. So check out the books.

Also echelon from, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership echelon front.com. Check that out. A bunch of live events that we do for individuals. FTX council battlefield.

We got the women's assembly happening September 11 through the 13th in San Antonio, Texas. We got the Nashville muster. We're at it right now when this is playing. Yeah. So that's sold out.

Next one's in Dallas. So if you want to come to one of these events, they all sell out. So register, go to echelonfront.com. Also we do consulting. So if you have a company, you need help with your leadership, you haven't need help with anything.

It's going to get solved through leadership. So echelonfront.com, where you have an online training academy as well, extreme ownership.com. Learn these principles virtually. We also have some charities that we support. So if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want help gold star families, check out Markle mom, Mama Lee.

She's got an amazing charity organization. She helps out veterans with health support that the VA is not going to pay for. So if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to americasmightywarriors.org dot. Also heroesandhorses.org comma, Micah Fink up in the mountains right now, last report, he just whittled a small stick and defended him and his family from an onslaught of grizzly bears in the mountains of Montana. And he takes veterans up to the mountains where they can, where they can get lost and get found it's an awesome program.

Jimmy may has also got an organization beyond the brotherhood.org. So there you go. We're all on the interwebs at Huberman lab, at Jockowillink, at Echo Charles, just watch out for the algorithm because there's a freaking psycho right now sitting there. Two of them, an engineer, a software engineer and a psychologist, and they're trying to figure out how to get you to stare at that screen longer, make that algorithm. They carved it up just for you.

Put little taunting, little things that you love. They know what you like. They can tell how long you looked at that post half an hour ago. They know that you looked at it for an extra 0.4 seconds, they're going to throw another one at you and then they'll throw another one at you and they get it honed until you're just addicted and you're wasting your life. Just don't let that happen.

Watch out for the algorithm. Thanks once again, Andrew, for joining us. Any closing thoughts for us? Just thanks so much for having me here. Thanks for giving me a venue to talk about some fun things, some harder things, you know, and let me show up from the heart.

Andrew Huberman

So I'm doing, and, you know, I always appreciate you and you both and people tuning in. It really, again, it's an honor and a privilege. So just very grateful. Right on, man. Well, thanks for what you do.

Jocko Willink

Thanks for getting the word out there, and thanks for helping people become better people. Also, we want to thank our men and women in uniform around the world holding the line right now and protecting our freedom and our way of life. We couldn't do what we're doing without you, doing what you're doing. So thank you from our hearts for getting out there and holding line. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, emts, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all other first responders.

Thanks for doing what you do to keep us safe here at home and to everyone else out there. Got one more quote for you from James Jones book from here to eternity. Quote, you had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain, like with cold water, until you finally got up your nerve to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down it clear to the bottom.

And after you had been down inside pain a while, you found that, like with cold water, it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around, trying to get up your nerve.

And that's it. It's a good call. It's a good call with life. Lean into the pain. Don't draw back away from it.

It won't be as bad as you thought. And in fact, it will make you better. So go get after it. And that's all we've got for tonight. Until next time, this is Andrew and Echo and Jocko out.

436: Lean Into The Pain. it Will Make You Better. With Andrew Huberman

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1: Introduction to Pain and Identity

2: Development and Choices

3: Building Resilience

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