What It Takes to Be Great | David Goggins & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | - It sounds like friction is something
00:00:04.620 | you're very familiar with.
00:00:05.820 | I just, it's a word just as I feel like it's like
00:00:08.020 | cast above us right now in bold face,
00:00:09.960 | highlighted, underlined letters.
00:00:11.580 | - Friction is growth.
00:00:12.420 | - Friction.
00:00:13.240 | - Yes.
00:00:14.080 | - Like you're up in the morning
00:00:15.100 | and I imagine David Goggins going to the coffee maker,
00:00:18.500 | stretching out, good morning, sunshine.
00:00:20.380 | And you're telling me from eyelids open, there's friction.
00:00:24.900 | - Yes, and that is the thing that people don't,
00:00:27.240 | they don't fucking get.
00:00:29.340 | The biggest misunderstanding about David Goggins of all time.
00:00:33.060 | It's like, whether you believe in God or not, I do.
00:00:35.560 | He put this lab rat, which is me, on this planet.
00:00:41.180 | And said, let me fucking see what a beat up abused kid
00:00:46.180 | who has, who can barely learn, barely learn,
00:00:50.480 | who has a twisted body, messed up, messed up genetics,
00:00:54.060 | sickle cell, this and that.
00:00:56.600 | Let me give him everything that pretty much disqualifies you
00:00:59.880 | from the military.
00:01:01.080 | But back then, it wasn't as stress,
00:01:03.280 | and let's put him in this and see what comes out of it.
00:01:06.920 | So to do that, friction, you don't wake up
00:01:10.200 | in the morning time and go to the coffee maker.
00:01:12.360 | Matter of fact, sometimes you don't even sleep.
00:01:14.780 | What it requires is when I'm at two o'clock,
00:01:17.720 | it's two o'clock in the morning,
00:01:19.780 | and my brain is thinking about a fucking drug.
00:01:22.560 | And I got to get up and look in my book
00:01:24.560 | to see what that drug is, how I remember it.
00:01:27.720 | And this is every day of my fucking life.
00:01:31.400 | That's why when I train a fighter or I train someone,
00:01:33.760 | I'm like, you have no fucking idea how great you really are.
00:01:37.320 | Because you are using such minimal,
00:01:41.320 | minimal of what you have.
00:01:43.920 | And if people can learn to focus, this is what's possible.
00:01:48.460 | While it may not be pretty,
00:01:50.240 | like people want to do a documentary on me.
00:01:51.960 | I go, no, I don't want you to do a documentary on me.
00:01:55.240 | Because I will have normal everyday people
00:01:58.780 | picking me apart on his life is miserable.
00:02:02.680 | Who wants to live like that?
00:02:04.640 | He looks, it's crazy how he's,
00:02:06.640 | it's almost like he's sick, he's psychotic.
00:02:08.780 | The most frustrating thing in the world for me
00:02:13.960 | is when normal people judge a man like myself
00:02:17.560 | on what it really takes to extract greatness from nothing.
00:02:22.560 | It takes every bit of who you are.
00:02:26.980 | If you choose that route, if you don't,
00:02:31.080 | Merry Christmas, do what you got to do.
00:02:33.640 | But yeah, all these things for me,
00:02:36.500 | like I told you, I'm going to keep it real.
00:02:39.400 | I'm not coming here to talk about like,
00:02:42.080 | you know, perform without purpose.
00:02:45.360 | 'Cause I go through, when I write these books,
00:02:48.620 | I go through and I try to dumb down David Goggins.
00:02:51.120 | How can I give normal people, and I'm normal,
00:02:55.520 | but I found something that most don't want to find.
00:02:58.120 | How can I speak to people and give them something
00:03:00.560 | from this crazy psychotic brain that I've developed?
00:03:04.040 | How can I give them that?
00:03:05.360 | So I sit down with Jennifer for years
00:03:08.400 | and write down perform without purpose,
00:03:11.440 | callous your mind, armor your mind,
00:03:14.640 | the cookie jar, the accountability mirror,
00:03:17.200 | shit that people can fucking use in their lives.
00:03:20.300 | No, no, I'm glad it helps you.
00:03:23.480 | But the barbaric life that I live,
00:03:27.960 | that you have to live, the almost obsession
00:03:31.200 | that you must have to be great,
00:03:33.340 | you can't put that shit in a fucking book, bro.
00:03:36.120 | You can't put in a book, you can't.
00:03:38.640 | You can't write about it.
00:03:39.880 | - It has to be experienced.
00:03:40.720 | - It has to be experienced.
00:03:42.320 | And you can't even, after you experience it,
00:03:45.020 | to write it in a book, it would seem like
00:03:49.280 | he needs to be locked up.
00:03:51.080 | - Too gory.
00:03:52.320 | - It's too gory, it doesn't make sense for a guy
00:03:54.160 | that everything, every second of the day,
00:03:57.480 | he is trying to extract more from something.
00:04:01.000 | He's constantly thinking, he's constantly disciplined,
00:04:05.360 | never going off the path.
00:04:07.200 | Whatever is injured on him, he figures away.
00:04:10.560 | It's a conqueror's mindset.
00:04:12.760 | And very few people, if any,
00:04:16.040 | can really understand what that is.
00:04:19.720 | Like, I'm almost 50 and I've been this way
00:04:23.840 | for almost 30 years.
00:04:26.000 | Like, what do you do for fun?
00:04:27.600 | You would never, like these questions,
00:04:30.400 | I don't get 'em, I don't understand 'em, I don't.
00:04:33.240 | So, yeah.
00:04:34.160 | - I get asked that sometimes.
00:04:35.240 | What do you do for fun?
00:04:36.060 | I start listing off all this stuff like podcasting,
00:04:37.840 | reading, working out.
00:04:39.960 | But, so some of that resonates,
00:04:42.040 | but I think what's so truly unusual
00:04:45.800 | about what you're describing, your process,
00:04:48.920 | is that, you know, from go, it's hard.
00:04:52.680 | And I have to ask, was being 300 pounds,
00:04:55.760 | having, I'm using the words you've described,
00:04:59.080 | you've said it before, you had a tendency
00:05:01.400 | at one point in your life, early on, tell lies,
00:05:04.360 | try and get people's approval.
00:05:05.560 | - Fly my ass off.
00:05:07.240 | - Crazy haircuts, attention seeking,
00:05:09.640 | and yet, all of that triggered something
00:05:14.320 | that now is, you know, is extraordinary.
00:05:18.600 | - Right.
00:05:19.880 | - Do you think those hardships
00:05:22.720 | were necessary to flip the switch?
00:05:25.760 | - I don't know if they were necessary,
00:05:27.800 | but it was something that made me feel,
00:05:30.260 | I didn't feel good, it was easy.
00:05:34.100 | The brain that I was given as a child,
00:05:39.400 | it was easy to go home and think about what,
00:05:41.720 | how do I want to be a freak today?
00:05:44.160 | How do I want to show up to school today and be a freak?
00:05:46.840 | It didn't require me going home and opening a book up
00:05:49.040 | saying, it's going to take me all year
00:05:51.720 | to learn this fucking page.
00:05:53.720 | So instead of learning that page,
00:05:56.200 | I learned how to become a character.
00:05:59.440 | And maybe that character that I created,
00:06:03.800 | that 300 pound insecure guy that used to fake,
00:06:07.880 | fake it 'til I make it type of guy,
00:06:09.840 | you know, let me become your friend,
00:06:12.080 | let me lie to you until you like me type of guy,
00:06:14.480 | when you have any kind of, any manhood, womanhood,
00:06:20.720 | a human being, a soul, a spirit, any,
00:06:24.400 | I had no, I must have just this much pride,
00:06:28.360 | 'cause that's exactly what opened the door for me.
00:06:30.840 | 'Cause every day you were a character,
00:06:32.400 | every day you were a clown,
00:06:33.440 | every day you opened that Spanish book
00:06:37.160 | or that science book or English book.
00:06:39.280 | And you like, you looked at it,
00:06:40.120 | it was like, it looked like a foreign language.
00:06:43.520 | And you're saying, where do I start?
00:06:47.040 | Well, who do I start?
00:06:48.960 | And obviously it was necessary.
00:06:51.560 | The more I talk about it, it was necessary.
00:06:53.080 | 'Cause what happened is I became haunted
00:06:56.080 | by the mere fact that this is my existence.
00:07:00.640 | And you gotta live with that.
00:07:03.200 | I lived with it for a lot of years.
00:07:05.240 | And so I sat back and said, okay, all right,
00:07:08.560 | I know what this takes.
00:07:09.640 | And when you sit back as fucked up as I was,
00:07:13.840 | and I had a laundry list, a table like this
00:07:18.240 | of what I have to do to become just a human being
00:07:22.040 | that can make ends meet,
00:07:24.520 | that can make a thousand dollars a month just to get there.
00:07:27.680 | Was like, oh my God, dude.
00:07:29.120 | Like, I'm 16, 17, I can't read, I can't write.
00:07:34.840 | And I, oh my God, I'm so behind the power curve.
00:07:38.520 | And my brain is about being depressed.
00:07:40.800 | And my dad beat, my mom's not home.
00:07:42.440 | And kids are calling me nigger at school.
00:07:44.840 | And I'm like, oh my God, man, what the fuck do I do?
00:07:47.560 | And it wasn't like someone came around and said,
00:07:50.800 | hey man, you can do this.
00:07:54.100 | This is all me.
00:07:55.080 | So people know, where's this cold man come from?
00:07:59.280 | I'm not trying to be cold.
00:08:00.580 | It's the reality of my life.
00:08:03.720 | It's the reality of a lot of people's lives.
00:08:06.360 | And so, yeah, that had to happen for me to be haunted,
00:08:11.120 | to be haunted, to pull out, to extract the guy I am today.
00:08:14.920 | That haunting is something that's still there today.
00:08:18.680 | Because no matter how much you improve,
00:08:20.480 | no matter how much you change who you are,
00:08:23.360 | it's not permanent.
00:08:25.180 | You'll just wake up and say, oh my God, man,
00:08:28.800 | you're David Goggins.
00:08:31.360 | You break records, you do this, you do that.
00:08:33.280 | People don't know, how are you able to just be so hard?
00:08:38.280 | 'Cause I never turned the fucking thing off.
00:08:41.440 | 'Cause once it turns off,
00:08:42.920 | I go right back to the David Goggins that is.
00:08:47.180 | And that's the guy that I'm constantly fighting every day.
00:08:50.360 | And it's a choice.
00:08:52.040 | And that choice makes you misunderstood.
00:08:54.160 | It makes you crazy.
00:08:55.320 | That's why I hate fucking social media.
00:08:58.520 | In 2013, people wanted me to write my book.
00:09:02.680 | I did it in 2018, took five years.
00:09:06.080 | And the reason why I didn't do it,
00:09:07.840 | I set a table and Jennifer was there.
00:09:10.000 | This is before she started working for me,
00:09:12.280 | I started dating her, whatever.
00:09:14.200 | And all these people were there.
00:09:15.900 | And they're like, man, you gotta go on social media.
00:09:18.600 | And I was like, fuck you, man.
00:09:20.560 | Like, I'm not, it's poison.
00:09:23.280 | It's poison because I knew what I did to get where I am.
00:09:27.400 | And I'm gonna have these people,
00:09:28.800 | these normal everyday people, fat, lazy,
00:09:33.400 | is exactly who I was, judging me.
00:09:37.040 | 'Cause I know it, 'cause I was once them.
00:09:40.800 | All my hard work, all my dedication,
00:09:42.560 | I'm gonna have some normal dude,
00:09:44.520 | get his little brownies, little ding-dong, ho-ho Twinkie,
00:09:48.040 | sit there with his coffee, picking me apart.
00:09:51.720 | Oh, he must be unhappy.
00:09:52.960 | He's just, do you know how hard it is
00:09:56.160 | to put these shoes on every damn morning?
00:09:57.960 | And I'm gonna have you pick me apart?
00:10:00.880 | So yeah, there's so much that goes into this
00:10:05.880 | that I was like, fuck this.
00:10:09.480 | I never want anything to do with it.
00:10:11.280 | (upbeat music)
00:10:13.860 | (upbeat music)
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